Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England

by Jessica Roberts Frazier

B.A. in English and French, May 2001, Furman University M.A. in English, May 2007, American University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2014

Dissertation directed by

Jonathan Gil Harris Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Jessica Roberts Frazier has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of June 3, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England

Jessica Roberts Frazier

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Holly Dugan, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

ii

© Copyright 2014 by Jessica Roberts Frazier All rights reserved

iii

Dedication

For my mom and my dad who raised me in a world of books; for my brother who was my playmate in that realm; for my sweet Raleigh, sunshine distilled; for my Will, for always.

iv Acknowledgements

Without Jonathan Gil Harris, “Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern

England” would not have come into existence. I had in mind a project much less glittering, of which diamonds served only a part. Gil whispered the siren call that enabled me to chase after the early modern diamond. I will be forever grateful that he did and forever indebted to him for the guidance and learning that oriented my path.

Professionally, I am a better scholar for having had the privilege of Gil’s insight and direction; personally, I am a better person for having known him. Without Holly Dugan,

“Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England” would not have come to a terminus. With her perspicacious reading, keen wit, and charmed verve, Holly gifted me the courage to bring this stage of the project to a close in my own voice. Holly, my gratitude is as ineffable as your generosity. Thank you. As will be evident, Jeffery Jerome

Cohen’s voice and writings haunt this project. His capacious thinking and generative interpretations have left their imprint in the pages here. But the kindness of his spirit and his readiness to witness to the scholar in all of his students have determined the kind of professor that I hope to be. For Jonathan Hsy, I possess gratitude that my life has been graced by his. Throughout the various stages of my graduate work, Jonathan bestowed intellectual inspiration, ready enthusiasm, and unyielding support that exceeded duty or expectation. The elegance of your mind is matched only by the depth of your heart. To

Amanda Bailey, my innumerable thanks for your willingness to engage with this project.

The thoughtful creativity with which you approached the project will enable a richer development of argument as I move forward.

v Little did I know how fortunate I would be in my literary cohort at George

Washington University. Lowell Duckert’s brilliant innovation in the field provided a model for me, and his friendship supplied continued affirmation. Nedda Mehdizadeh served as my own personal Tim Gunn. Without her steadying voice, I would have been adrift time and time again. Her intelligence, her insight, and her love have been gifts indeed. To Jennifer Wood, the other half of J-Force, my deepest gratitude for seeing me through to the end of our journey together. The profundity of your thought and loveliness of your spirit stir reflection and aspiration.

Many other individuals have touched this project. Education Officer Antonia

Keaney and Archivist John Forster at Blenheim Palace generously and continually furnished information about the Woodstock Palace plinth without which Chapter One would have been impoverished. And Ms. Keaney took time from her charged schedule to supply the photo of the plinth included here. Keith Leonard, Madhavi Menon, David

Pike, and Roberta Rubenstein opened the way for me to pursue doctoral studies. The genius and rigor of Madhavi’s theorization continue to inform my approach, and the kindness of her heart continues to aspire affection. Without David Pike, I would not have known that early modern fashion was my future. Without his unswerving dedication to teaching and to mentoring, this project would not have begun. And to Bill Aarnes, my sincerest love and thanks for setting me on this road so many years ago, for seeing a future that I did not yet know was possible.

I was privileged to spend the last two years of my assistantship at the Folger

Shakespeare Library with Shakespeare Quarterly . In assuming the position, I little realized the profound impact that my time there would make upon this project and upon

vi my heart. Time and again, Gail Kern Paster offered sagacious advice and direction. I will always be grateful for the support that she has given and continues to give, and the lovely smile with which she bestows it. Anna Levine listened to me muddle endlessly through a variety of diamond quandaries. And, in the end, she directed me toward Elaine

Freedgood’s incomparable The Ideas in Things . Anna, you are truly the best of souls.

And to Mimi Godfrey, how I am even to begin? Your guidance, your patience, your persistence, your almost incomprehensible kindness—these gifts steadied my footing during tumultuous times. Your presence enabled perseverance. Your friendship has been one of the joys of my life.

Finally, to my family. My parents, Vicki and Jim Roberts, have provided me with a life of literature, learning, and love. Their commitment to education resulted in a daughter equally ardent in her passion for teaching. My dad has encouraged every daydream, and my mom has lovingly read the words that resulted. My brother, Brian, his wife, Jennifer, and my precious niece and nephew have sprinkled love and encouragement over my endeavors. My husband, Will, told me that I could do this: so I did. Thank you for walking this long road with me and for the love that made the many steps joyful. And, finally, to our little girl, Raleigh, whose smile outshines the fairest diamond and whose pride in “mama working” reminded me of the project’s importance.

vii Abstract of Dissertation

Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England

A simple question animates this project: What did people living in early modern

England think about diamonds? Put differently, what was a diamond for the English during the Tudor and Stuart reigns? This dissertation follows the travels and travails of the diamond through a variety of generically distinct works from the poetry of Elizabeth I and the historiography of John Foxe to the narratives of travelers and merchants like John

Mandeville, Ralph Fitch, and William Methwold to the plays of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Through these texts, we learn that that while in some respects the diamond extends a shared point of contact between our moment and that of England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in others, the diamond reflects an early modern orientation toward its contours radically distinct from but instructive to our engagement with the stone. An interrogation into diamonds in early modern England matters because the matter of the diamond nuances our understanding of the way that the stone inflected culture, economics, politics, and religion broadly, and theories of affect, materiality, and phenomenology specifically. In terms of historical and literary scholarship, this proves important work. However, the early modern diamond also refracts our own purchase on and of a crystalline structure that has underwritten amputations, massacre and war in countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe; child labor in parts of India; and the heteronormative love of the modern marriage market, particularly in the United States. Thus, a reconsideration of our (im)material engagement with the stone is of no little ethical urgency.

viii Table of Contents

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………v

Abstract of Dissertation…………………………………………………………………viii

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...... x

Introduction: Diamond Reorientations……………………………………………………1

Chapter 1: Writing Diamond Desire in Reformation England…………………………..34

Chapter 2: Traveling in Early Modern Diamond Myth and Narrative…………………..79

Chapter 3: Staging Diamond Economies of (Dis)Enchantment ……………………….136

Coda: Diamonds of the Old Water……………………………………………………..180

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………188

ix List of Figures

Figure 1………………………………………………………………………………….46

x

Introduction: Diamond Reorientations

In the case of the Wittelsbach, what's at stake is at minimum over 350 years of history, as every nick, chip, and scratch has a story to tell. Just because we can’t decipher these stories doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

~ Scott Sucher on the recent cutting of the famed Wittelsbach Diamond 1

In The Art of Limning (c. 1600), Nicholas Hilliard appeals to gemstones when detailing for the portrait miniaturist the “perfect cullors” of which he or she should make use. 2 By the time that he penned his treatise, Hilliard stood as one of the most celebrated limners in England, and he had served Queen Elizabeth I in this capacity for roughly three decades. Yet Hilliard was not only limner to the Queen but also goldsmith.

Apprenticed at 15 to the prominent goldsmith Robert Brandon, Hilliard spent his middle teenage years amongst the glittering trade of Cheapside. 3 Thus, the space that he grants to gemstones in his manuscript, as well as the jeweled approximations ornamenting the painted bodies of his sitters, originate from a profound and nuanced understanding of stone. He writes, “I saye for certayne truth, that ther are besides whit, and black, but five prefect cullors in the world which I prove by the five principal precious stones (bearing cullor).”4 Two columns follow setting the “ Annatist ” [amethyst] with “ Murrey ,” the

“Rubye ” [ruby] with “ Redd ,” the “ Saphier ” [sapphire] with “ Blewe ,” the “ Emarod ”

1 Scott Sucher, “Requiem for the Wittelsbach,” “Museum Diamonds,” Accessed May 15, 2015, http://www.museumdiamonds.com/~scottsuc/index.php/wittelsbach.html. 2 Nicholas Hillard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning , ed. Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 1983), 37. 3 For Nicholas Hilliard’s biography, see “Hilliard, Nicholas (1547?–1619),” Mary Edmond in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13320 (accessed August 6, 2014) and Arthur F. Kinney, introduction to A Treatise Concerning the Art of Limning , by Nicholas Hilliard (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 3-12. 4 Hilliard, 37. 1 [emerald] with “ Greene ,” and the “ Topias oriental ” [topaz] with “Yeallowe.”5 The subsequent paragraphs expand upon the direct correspondence established by this simple table of gems and color, describing the qualities of the stones and the hues that they embody. The diamond here appears only intermittingly, often as a point of comparison.

While Hilliard mentions a scattering of colored diamonds, these stones seem novel exceptions to achromatic expectations. We assume the diamond’s absence from the list a simple consequence of its associated colorlessness.

However, when Hilliard grants extended space to the diamond, the discernable and straight lines connecting jewels and colors wander away. Indeed, he can introduce the diamond only through a riddle: “…but now (as it weare in a Ridle) I demand what

Stone is that which hath…in it two distinct and perfect cullors very apparent, and hath in it no cullor at all, yet if one looke longe into it, it hath many cullors radient and strange, but the Diamond.”6 Far from being a stone readily classifiable by its lack of color, the diamond exists as a thing of contradiction. It wears a Janus mask of white and black— colors peerless by the miniaturist’s account but simultaneously no colors at all: “And although white and blacke be both thicke cullors in painting, and not transparent, yet in the diamond they are cullors transparent and cleere, and which may be counted amonst the transparent cullors both of whit and blacke, if whit and black [sic] weare counted cullors, as they are not.”7 Commas and conditionals dizzy the reader as she attempts to

“count” and “discount” white and black as colors. But even as we negotiate the diamond as sole possessor of such peerless singularity, the colorless colors of white and black,

5 Hilliard, 38-9. 6 Hilliard, 44. 7 Ibid. 2 Hilliard insists upon the diamond’s motley plurality. It hosts a riot of hues ineffable beyond an articulation of their “radiance” and “strangeness.” Yet this variegation emerges before the human from the depths of the diamond only after a prolonged engagement with a stone that is also “cleere, more cleerer then Ayre.”8

This vertiginous duality extends from color to light, for Hilliard tells the reader that “nothing hath his light more white [than the diamond], nor his shadowe more black.”9 Light and darkness play together along the contours of a substance seemingly as much liquid as stone. (Perhaps fittingly, Hilliard paints his diamond facsimiles with

“liquid…Sillver.”10 ) And yet, for this mercurial gem, Hilliard asserts its constancy as

“the best waye to knowe a diamond from an other Stone without hurting it.”11 He concludes the section on the diamond by confessing a mystery formerly known presumably only by goldsmiths: “…being set on his [the diamond’s] black teyntor, or on any black pitch molten fast underneath unto him, he changeth not his bright cleere whitnes, as any other Stone would doe, as Topas , Spahiere [sic], white Rubye , or what soever.”12 In conditions that would seem to force material change, the diamond does not alter. As the heat of molten “resin” scorches its surface, the diamond does not singe or smolder. It persists in “his cleere whitnes”—a distinguishing feature as certain as the gem’s percussion of colors “radient and strange.” 13 Hilliard proclaims such permanence

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Hilliard, 36. 11 Hilliard, 44. 12 Hilliard, 44. 13 See definitions 1 and 2a. for “pitch” in the OED, “pitch, n.1,” OED Online. June 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/144680?rskey=Qn3d6f&result=1&is Advanced=false (accessed August 06, 2014). 3 “a most admirable thinge to consider among the secrets in nature.”14 After reading the goldsmith turned artist’s disquisition on the diamond, the bewildered reader is prepared to admit the stone itself as a wonder indeed.

A simple question animates this project: What did people living in early modern

England think about diamonds? Put differently, what was a diamond for the English during the Tudor and Stuart reigns? In some respects, the diamond extends a shared point of contact between our moment and that of Tudor and Stuart England. In others, the diamond reflects an early modern orientation toward its contours radically distinct from but instructive to our engagement with the stone. An interrogation into diamonds in

England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries matters because the matter of the diamond nuances our understanding of the way that the stone inflected culture, economics, politics, and religion broadly, and theories of affect, materiality, and phenomenology specifically. In terms of historical and literary scholarship, this proves important work. However, the early modern diamond also refracts our own purchase on and of a crystalline structure that has been described as “at the heart of the Earth, at the heart of the Stars, at the heart of Power.” 15 With diamonds underwriting amputations, massacre, and war in countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe; child labor in parts of

India; and the heteronormative love of the modern marriage market, particularly in the

14 Hilliard, 44. 15 This quotation derives from the subtitle for an exhibit at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris that took place from March 10, 2001 through July 15, 2001. In French, it reads: “Au coeur de la Terre, au coeur des Étoiles, au coeur du Pouvoir”; See Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, “Diamants: Au coeur de la Terre, au coeur des Étoiles, au coeur du Pouvoir,” Communiqué de Presse, http://www.mnhn.fr/expo/diamants. 4 United States, a reconsideration of our (im)material engagement with the stone is of no little ethical urgency. 16

To an extent, the answer as to what an early modern diamond was comes readily: a gem of incomparable hardness, the diamond made its way into England via trade routes from India, the sole global source of the stone prior to a discovery in Brazil during the eighteenth century. 17 In The Gouldesmithes Storehouse (c. 1604), Hannibal Gamon, a

London goldsmith, pronounces the diamond the bar against whose “weight” all other gemstones are measured: “The Dyamon being Kinge, as whoise [sic] of all prectious stones is sould by A weight from Marchant to Marchant.”18 By Gamon’s estimation, a

16 On the human cost of diamonds see, Harvey Morris, “Taylor Gone but Blood Diamonds are Forever,” New York Times , April 27, 2012, accessed May 6, 2014, http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/taylor-gone-but-blood-diamonds-are- forever/; Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Measuring a Diamond’s True Price,” New York Times , December 17, 2006, accessed May 20, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/weekinreview/17mcneil.html?_r=0; Lydia Polgree, “Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears,” New York Times , March 25, 2007, accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/world/africa/25diamonds.html?pagewanted=all&_r =0; Nikki van der Gaag, Diamonds (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2006), 39. 17 See Bruce Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade and the Growth of Geographical Knowledge from Columbus to James I,” Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice , ed. Jean Brink and William Gentrup (Brookfield, VT: Scholar Press, 1993), 86-99, esp. 88; Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty, 317. 18 The Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of the manuscript containing The Gouldesmithes Storehouse does not indicate authorship of the tract. However, scholars concur that the most likely author was Hannibal Gamon. See Bruce P. Lenman, ‘The East India Company and the Trade in Non-Metallic Precious Materials from Sir Thomas Roe to Diamond Pitt,” The Worlds of the East India Company , ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2002), 97-109 and Hazel Forsyth, The Cheapside Hoard: London’s Lost Jewels (London: Philip Wilson, 2013). Citation from Gamon’s text derive from the Folger manuscript; see [Hannibal Gamon], The Gouldesmithes Storehouse (c. 1604), 64r.

5 perfect diamond of one carat values at 50 ducats.19 In comparison, the goldsmith prices a pearl of equal size and “in all partes perfect”—a gem whose presence has dominated our conception of English Renaissance jewelry—at one ducat. 20 A comparable ruby, also deriving from “the Indies,” eclipsed both the diamond and the pearl in cost, selling for

200 ducats; however, as Gamon remarks, or perhaps laments, “…there are few Rubies so parfitt.”21 In her work on the Cheapside Hoard, Museum of London curator Hazel

Forsyth pronounces the diamond “the most popular” if not “the most valuable of gemstones” in early modern England, noting “Of the jewels specifically listed in the

Exchequer records of the Jewel House during the later part of Elizabeth’s reign…approximately three-quarters were diamond-set.”22 And indeed, Gamon excuses his “Tedious..discoursing” about the diamond to the stone’s status as “the most precious stone [and] most esteemed with us, [and] other Countries, aboue any other Stones.” “I could do no less,” Gamon confesses.23 Thus, the diamond in early modern England circulated both as an excruciatingly fashionable foreign novelty and as a commodity of substantial value.

Yet, as Hilliard’s text indicates, another diamond discourse revolved in the culture. In the miniature sketch of a diamond that Hilliard offers, we trace a mineralized paradox: a gem whose very constitution both refuses movement and flows in a current of change. This is a stone that exceeds the status of commodity and the requisites of style, and defies the expectations of its material architecture. The liminality of the diamond that

19 [Gamon], 64r. 20 [Gamon], 95v. 21 [Gamon], 87r. 22 Forsyth, 166. 23 [Gamon], 66v[?]. 6 Hilliard conjures stretches back to Pliny. As John Considine notes, Pliny’s Historie of the

World continued to direct thought in early modern England, and in 1601 the ancient philosopher’s treatise became available in English for the first time with Philemon

Holland’s incomparable translation.24 For Pliny, the diamond exists as the most profound embodiment of the Greek concept of “Sympathia and Antipathia,” what the Roman writer glosses as “the concord and discord that is between things natural.”25 He writes, “…in nothing throughout the world may we observe both the one & the other more evidently, than in the Diamant: For this invincible mineral (against which neither fire nor steele, the two most violent and puissant creatures of Natures making, have any power, but that it checketh and despiseth both the one and the other) is forced to yield the gantelet and give place unto the bloud of a Goat.”26 A thing of intense repulsion and attraction, the diamond thwarts flame and anvil only to capitulate to the warmth of blood. Obdurate and immovable, the characterization that we grant as the hallmark of the stone, the solitary diamond melts into the flow of blood: “…so that the Diamant once crack [sic], you shall see it breake and crumble into so small peeces, that hardly the eie can discerne the one from the other.”27 Perhaps it is only fitting that the blood with which the diamond—a substance seemingly caught betwixt two states of matter, solid and liquid—melds must

24 “Holland, Philemon (1552–1637),” John Considine in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, , http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13535 (accessed August 6, 2014). 25 [Pliny], The Historie of the VVorld Commonly Called, the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus , trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), STC 20029, fol. 610. I am grateful to Jeffrey Cohen for drawing my attention to this passage in Pliny. 26 [Pliny], 610. 27 [Pliny], 610. 7 exist somewhere between life and death, “whiles it is fresh drawn from the beast before it be cold.”28

Holland’s translation of Pliny, Hilliard’s treatise, Gamon’s manuscript, all were produced within the opening years of the seventeenth century. Of their respective treatment of the diamond, Pliny and Gamon would seem to be the furthest apart. While

Hilliard does not invoke the blood of Pliny, he presents a diamond similarly structured out of concord and discord. A bearer of contradiction, Hilliard’s diamond, like Pliny’s, is a stone that flows. But Gamon’s diamond is set amidst economic rhetoric (the first portion of the manuscript deals with England’s mint) and mercantile knowledge. The attention that Gamon grants to the geographic sourcing of diamonds and their market value suggests a man intimately familiar with the profit to be had from the gemstone purely as commodity. Indeed, Pliny’s name appears in The Gouldesmithes Storehouse as an instance of refutation. Gamon challenges Pliny’s assertion that diamonds are rarely

“bigger than a walnut.”29 And the goldsmith grants to the diamond itself rather than to goat’s blood the ability to transfigure the gem: “…no Instument in the worlde will cut a

Dyamon, or polish a Dyamon but himself.”30 However, a passage appears in Gamon’s entry on the diamond that not only echoes of Pliny but also complicates the notion of the diamond as merely fashionable commodity. Like Pliny, Gamon attributes agency to the diamond, writing that the diamond can “Aswageth t[he] Creltye of Enemyes [:] it expelleth from [the] minde vaine thoughte, it driveth [away] madness, it putteth

28 [Pliny], 610. 29 [Gamon], 62r. 30 [Gamon], 62v. 8 [away]…fearfull [dread].”31 A gem that is bought and sold, worked on and worked over, can act upon the human. Thus, in Gamon’s tract emerges a version of Pliny’s Sympathia and Antipathia as written with the diamond. Situated within the diamond is a commodity, uncoupled from the human and animate only through a category confusion, and an agent capable of redirecting the human with whom it comes into contact. At the very beginning of his chapter on the diamond, Pliny notes, “…neither was it knowne for a long time what a Diamant was.”32 By the end of Pliny, Hilliard, and Gamon’s writings about the diamond, the answer remains hidden in the stone.

But for literary scholars, the early modern diamond has presented no such sphinxian perplexity. The critical impulse when addressing diamonds in early modern

English texts, to the extent that they are addressed at all, has been to interpolate the stone into the framework of symbolism. Carol Slade well summarizes this tendency, even as she herself partakes of it, in her contribution to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural

History’s exhibition catalogue for The Nature of Diamonds (1997). Slade writes:

“English writers have most often depicted diamonds indirectly, with figurative

devices—such as metaphor, symbol, and personification…Renaissance

playwrights drew on the symbolic associations of diamonds to express

unspeakable anxieties about the religious and ethnic purity of England as a

nation…In using diamonds to express concerns such as these, English writers

31 [Gamon], 63v. 32 [Pliny], 609. 9 have given them a symbolic value that exceeds their monetary worth and even

their physical beauty.” 33

Essays about diamonds in early modern literature and glosses on mentions of diamonds in the works themselves would seem to support Slade’s assertion. Diamonds bespeak beauty, fortitude, peerlessness, preciousness, purity, and steadfastness. Emptied of materiality, the diamond never stands for itself but always for something else, very often an abstract quality subsequently mapped on to the female body. Of Shakespeare, Slade notes, “Most of Shakespeare’s references to diamonds are metaphors for the ideal woman. To be comparable to a diamond, the Shakespearean woman required virtue, beauty, fidelity, and most important chastity.” 34 For David Golz, early modern mentions of diamonds, which he terms “hardly common objects in late medieval and early modern

England,” would also have triggered an association in the hearer between gem and woman. He writes, “Everyday speakers linked them, of course, with wealth and treasure, but also with innocence and virginity, and the writers of romances used them to symbolize the idealized, unalloyed beauty of the chaste females who were the objects of their heroes’ quests. Players on the London stage in the time of Shakespeare invoked them to mark the role of the eminently desirable woman.”35

Chapter Three will examine in greater detail the attempt at correspondence, or lack thereof, between the female body and that of the diamond. Yet the refusal of

33 For Slade, only the diamonds of Victorian literature managed to land “starring roles” as stone rather than elided symbol. See Carol Slade, “The Value of Diamonds in English Literature,” The Nature of Diamonds , ed. George E. Harlow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 171-177, esp. 171. 34 Slade, 171-72. 35 David Golz, “Diamonds, Maidens, Widow Dido, and Cock-a-diddle-dow,” Comparative Drama 43 (2009):167-96, esp.168. 10 scholars like Slade and Golz to consider diamonds in early modern literature as anything other than symbolic perhaps tells us more about the nature of academic hermeneutics than it does about the nature of diamonds . Indeed, the way that we read diamonds in early modern literature shares much with the way that we often read early modern culture itself. Referring to the meaning of diamonds for early modern figures like Mary Queen of

Scots and Queen Elizabeth I, Victoria Finlay writes, “But in those days every flower, stone, and animal was symbolic of something….” 36 Finlay is a journalist rather than a specialist in the early modern period. A short history on a variety of gems, her book promotes different interests, although valuable, than those of the scholar of Renaissance

England. However, her comment gestures toward the way that we have been teaching and writing about early modern England and its objects. Until quite recently, we have continued to insist upon a known signification for the object as linguistic marker in a

Renaissance text.

This signification has tended to take one of two forms, both of which are quietly present in Slade’s assessment of the diamond in English literature. The first participates in what one might deem formalism’s replacement of the object with a stable, symbolic meaning. Of course, this could also describe a certain historicist approach to materiality in Renaissance literature. “Every flower, stone, and animal was symbolic of something”—if we map the symbolic landscape, then we can provide a key translating objects into their intended signification. The second approach belongs to cultural materialism and new historicism, so long ascendant in early modern literary studies.

Here, as Douglas Bruster well describes, the anecdote of the object lays bare the

36 Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History (New York: Ballantine, 2006), esp. 346. 11 machinations of power and the resultant cultural anxieties: “A very different orientation characterizes cultural materialism, which can be defined as a critical practice concerned with the cultural embeddedness of aesthetic objects…and the inescapably political nature of all cultural production and interpretation.” 37 The object within a cultural materialist/new historicist paradigm can tend to serve as a materialization of cultural capital and the power that determines its circulation. In either interpretative model, despite their contributions to the field, signification often has less to do with the material object than it does with the human culture, specifically the academic culture, in which the object finds itself.

Elaine Freedgood has critiqued literary studies’ continued affection for such reading strategies reliant upon metaphor, broadly conceived. In The Ideas in Things , she writes, “Modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism have of course vastly complicated our ideas about reading; nonetheless, what has by now become a largely middlebrow practice of reading—that is to say, a kind of reflexive, thematic reading that derives from picking out metaphors—still sticks to most of the objects of realist fiction.”38 In her introduction, she reminds us that “meaning is paid for with material, with things.”39 For Freedgood, even amidst burgeoning industrialization and capitalism, the Victorian period’s purchase on objects exceeded the categories of allegorical cipher and/or deracinated commodity (rooted only in the present of novelty), so much a part of our life with things now. She argues, “A host of ideas resided in

37 Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 197. 38 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 39 Freedgood, 10. 12 Victorian things: abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization had to compete for space with other kinds of object relations—ones that we have yet to appreciate.”40 Thus,

Freedgood seeks to return to novelistic objects—mahogany furniture, calico, “Negro head” tobacco—a material dimension that would have resonated with contemporary readers. To an extent, she grants these things travel narratives—stories of place, geographies of cultivation, histories of production. Channeling the figure of Benjamin’s

“collector,” Freedgood adopts the theoretical (il)logic of metonymy as opposed to the methodology of straight allegory or metaphor. 41 Allowing the touch of objects to spread like an ink blot, a metonymical mode of criticism encourages waywardness and vicarious networks of “associations”: “[Metonymy] embarrasses interpretation because of its apparent contingency, its seeming inability to provide a unitary or singular meaning, or a kind of critical ‘truth’ (or the appearance thereof).”42

Freedgood is a scholar of Victorian literature, particularly the realist novel.

Historically separated from the early modern period by over two centuries and generically distinct, the English texts that she canvasses in The Ideas in Things possess different concerns and preoccupations than those that I examine here. And the objects in these novels that Freedgood marks and follows have accrued little critical attention because they seem so unrepentingly unsymbolic , part of a generalized patina of realism, distinguishing them markedly from the entirely overdetermined symbolism that scholars attach to the early modern diamond. Nevertheless, Freedgood’s elegant work provides scaffolding for the kind of thinking that could illuminate early modern material studies.

40 Freedgood, 8. 41 Freedgood, 3. 42 Freedgood, 13, 14. 13 Freedgood suggests that the nineteenth century had yet to embrace fully the disavowal of commodity fetishism. This proved even more the case in the proto-capitalist England of the mid 1500s and early 1600s—a time at which trade dominance and empire could not quite be discerned along a hopeful horizon. An awareness of fashion objects’ past voyages—not necessarily diachronic itineraries, as Gil Harris emphasizes—permeated the cultural consciousness and populated the rantings of pamphleteers worried over the integrity of the English self. 43

On the surface, the glassy facets of the diamond would seem to veil its material origins and the routes and hands by which it journeyed. The diamond thus appears to resonate with Julian Yates’s work on early modern portrait miniatures, particularly those of Hilliard. Yates argues that the technical smoothness with which Hilliard achieved the sitter’s face, coupled with the absence of the artist’s name from the frame, permitted an object painted without history. He writes, “The practice of not signing the finished miniature completes this trajectory; the artist and the labor of production are folded into the work and forgotten.”44 As a result, the miniature becomes a surface for projected desire, “an occasion for fantasy.”45 I would argue that this is certainly our experience of the diamond today. Largely, those of us with diamond weddings rings on our fingers either do not investigate the autobiography of the stone in our possession for fear of a grisly past that might sully its present, or we accept the documentation of the Kimberley

Process, which supposedly guarantees diamonds sans conflict, as permission to give the

43 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2009). 44 Julian Yates, Error, Misues, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota Press, 2003), 53. 45 Yates, 50. 14 gem’s background no further thought. 46 The diamond itself seems determinedly taciturn, and we welcome the silence as an opportunity for our desires: the diamond as symbol of heteronormative forever, the diamond as a valuable commodity. But the early modern diamond provided for a roughness, nooks and crannies in which history gained traction.

In the early modern texts from which diamonds wink, the stones have a way of voicing their own travel narratives, even as aspects of the texts appear to foreclose on that possibility. Part of the work then of “Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England” lies in materializing the networks through which the diamond moved, allowing the diamond its history, and acknowledging an early modern sentience toward “object relations” far more nuanced than our own.

However, as the writings of Pliny, Hilliard, and Gamon indicate, the early modern diamond’s engagement with the human went beyond histories of production, networks of labor and trade, and cultural exchange. The diamond could act on and with the human in the present, shaping her apprehension of the world, of desire, and directing her future. In the early modern world, a permeability between subject and object persisted, enabling an

“object relations” radically distinct from the post-Cartesian moment of the Victorians and

Freedgood and us. Thus, “Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England” extends the metonymic reading of Freedgood to allow for the queer proximity of the trope, the ability of two entities to touch unexpectedly—what Madhavi Menon identifies as a

46 On the Kimberely Process, see Alan Cowell, “Measuring the True Price of Diamonds,” The New York Times , 13 February 2012, accessed August 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/world/europe/14iht-letter14.html?_r=0. 15 “suggestive contiguity” and Carie Howie terms “a relationship of contiguity.”47 For early moderns, the metonymic contiguity of the diamond would have encompassed not only the far-reaching vagaries of historical nodes and networks but also the immediacy of an intimacy as described by James Bromley. Bromley posits an early modern conception of intimacy tied to “the superficial” rather than to “psychic depth.”48 He writes, “In the linguistic history of the uses of the word ‘intimate,’ the proximal and the superficial, in the sense of dealing with bodily surfaces, remain unexplored roots…If this root were brought to bear on rationality, interpersonal connections that occur primarily between bodies, rather than minds, might be reconsidered as valuable forms of intimacy.”49 While

Bromley attends primarily to the human, his renegotiation of early modern intimacy proves suggestive for the way that we think about the relationship between humans and things in the period. And as many of the texts explored here intimate, the surface touch between early modern subject and early modern diamond could be profoundly moving.

In advocating for a metonymic approach to the early modern diamond, I do not mean to suggest that diamonds never served as what Thomas Nicols terms “types and figures” in his Lapidary, or the History of Pretious Stones (1652). 50 Certainly, the

English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sometimes symbolically contextualized the gem. In his entry on the diamond, Nicols suggests that the stone readily lent itself to writers for what it signifies: “There is a proverbiall use of it, which is

47 See Madhavi Menon, “Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy,” ELH 70 (2003): 653- 75, esp. 658 and Carie Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 93. 48 James M. Bromley, Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6, 14. 49 Bromley, 6. 50 Thomas Nicols, Lapidary or, The History of Pretious Stones (Cambridge, 1652), C3v 16 taken from its hardnesse, and applied either to animate or inanimate things…A main use of it there is in the way of Symboles and Emblems: for by it is figured innocence, constancie, and fortitude.” 51 However, the kind of diamond figuration that Nicols here addresses does not necessarily imply a conceptual dematerialization. In the world of

Renaissance drama, diamonds frequently resist the material evacuation of metaphor (and the historical emptying of the commodity), as Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and

Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice evince. Put differently, early modern playwrights, like

Marlowe and Shakespeare, located in the diamond much more than an empty vehicle for poetry’s rhetorical turns or for value in an emerging world market. Moreover, as a work like Nicols’s demonstrates, within the milieu of Reformation and post-Reformation

England, the diamond as trope presented both material possibilities and difficulties.

Produced in the early years of Cromwell’s Protectorate, Nicols’s lapidary postdates many of the works considered here, particularly those in Chapter Two,

“Writing Diamonds in Reformation England.” Puritan ascendance in the wake of civil war and regicide, coupled with scientific change, produced for Nicols a historical reality that was not necessarily that of earlier English subjects who crafted the majority of the works examined in “Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England.” Yet the

Lapidary, or History of Pretious Stones belies the notion of whiggish progress and reveals the relationship between the diamond and rhetoric to be a far from settled matter .

Nicols rhapsodizes about the “blessings” of gems: “What creatures here on earth, have we, that are endued with so much sincertie, puritie, claritie and splendor, that are so fit to

51 Nicols, I2v. 17 resemble heavenly things….” 52 The traits here listed are not abstract qualities loosely associated with precious stones but “vertus” possessed by them. Nicols ends the passage by avering that “knowledge” of gems “mediate the wonderfull workings of God in his creatures.” 53 But an understanding of the stone’s material is also that which enables its transmutation into allegory: “…the depths also of the mysteries of other writers, who under the titles and figures of Gemms have comprehended many excellent allegories, by the true knowledge of pretious stones will easily be found out….” 54 The precious stone, the diamond, becomes a glass through which one comes into contact with “…the intricate sense, hidden meaning, and deep mysteries of the sacred truths of his holy word….” 55 We witness in Nicols a tension between the matter of the gem as that which grants access to the divine, and the matter of the gem as a sign that must yield allegorically to the signified of God—between the matter of a precious stone profoundly affecting the human, and the matter of a precious stone incapable of directing us.

The kind of knowledge for which Nicols lobbies is a comprehension of a gem’s

“natural faculties.” 56 Nicols distinguishes between a precious stone’s “natural effects” and those “[s]upernatruall effects” attributed to them. 57 “[N]aturall effects,” such as

“[d]iaphanitie,” transparencie,” “colour,” and “hardness,” result from the actual material constitution of the stone. 58 The “natural effects” of a gem like a diamond Nicols grants and champions. “Supernaturall effects,” the possibility of gemnological agency in the

52 Nicols, C3v 53 Nicols, C4r 54 Nicols, C3v 55 Nicols, C3v 56 Nicols, F3v 57 Nicols, G1r 58 Nicols, D1r, D1v, D2r, E1r 18 human and natural order, he derides as chimerical—“errours” inaugurated by “the great searchers out of the secrets of nature” and persisted in “even at this day.” 59 Only divine or diabolical forces working through the stone could engender such change. Thus, by

Nicols’s definitions, a diamond “will snatch colour and apply it and unite it to it self,” but it cannot “give to its bearer boldness and high spirits,” as the fourteenth-century English writer John Mandeville asserts. 60 To a diamond’s “natural faculties” 61 can we attribute biblical figures and writers’ allegorical deployment of the stone.

However, as becomes clear from Nicols’s efforts to articulate the (im)material relationship between the gemstone and the divine, “natural effects” can be affective. Nor is the differentiation between “naturall” and “supernatural effects” simple to discern.

Nicols martials extensive lists of “Rules” to assist in determining “naturall” from

“supernatural.” 62 But as the instructions and explanations accumulate, one begins to wonder about the certainty of Nicols’s conviction. The reader appealing to the “Rules” as a means to understand Nicols’s discussion “Of the properties, qualities, and faculties of the diamond” specifically will find herself at a loss. 63 Without qualification, Nicols lists the “divine vertues” that many “Ancients” granted the stone. 64 Are we to assume that these “divine vertues” constitute maligned “supernaturall effects,” missteps by those

“great searchers out of the secrets of nature”? And at moments, Nicols chooses not to offer a diachronic positioning of the diamonds “divine vertues”: “It is reported of it [the

59 Nicols, F3r-v 60 Nicols, H3v and John Mandeville, The Book of Jon Mandeville , ed. and trans. Ian Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 99. 61 Nicols, F3v 62 Nicols, G2r passim 63 Nicols, I1r 64 Nicols, I2r 19 diamond] that it is endued with such a faculty, as that if it be in place with a Load-stone, it bindeth up all its power, and hindereth all its attractive virtue.” 65 Was this “reported” in the then of the “Ancients”—in the time of “Plinie,” “Serapius,” “Cardanus,” and

“Garcias”—or in the now of Nicols, “even at this day”? 66 Is this a “naturall effect” engendered by the material properties of the diamond itself?

In his Travels , Mandeville makes a similar claim for the diamond, perhaps not surprisingly as he drew upon the kinds of lapidary sources to which Nicols also turned. 67

In a passage detailing the ways to confirm a diamond’s authenticity, Mandeville writes,

“Next, one takes adamant, which is the sailors’ stone that attracts the needle, and if the diamond is real and powerful the adamant will not attract the needle at all while the diamond is there.” 68 In his gloss on the passage, Mandeville editor Ian Macleod Higgins aligns “adamant” with “the loadstone” to which Nicols makes reference, writing

“they [“Medieval writers”] used it [“adamant”] more often for the loadstone or magnetized iron….” 69 In Mandeville, the adamant or loadstone emerges as a compass— an implement of orientation, a stone that helps one find one’s way. In the company of the diamond, the play of the adamant/loadstone and the needle stops: the compass fails. Bill

Brown suggests that an object’s refusal to do the kind of work that we anticipate of it

65 Nicols, I2r 66 Nicols, I1v, I2r 67 Nicols’s Lapidary , though, appears to have been much more than a compilation of recycled information about gems. The entry for Nicols in the ODNB suggests that he likely had first-hand knowledge of gem cutting and setting. See Thompson Cooper, “Nicols, Thomas (fl. 1652),” rev. Nigel Israel, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20184 (accessed May 7, 2014). 68 Mandeville, 100. 69 Mandeville, 348n. 20 reveals the ways in which it works on us. For Brown, such moments realign the way that we think about our existence with the stuff of the world. He writes, “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” 70 In Mandeville, the refusal of attraction between the needle and adamant/loadstone points not only to the failure of the compass, but also to the workings of the diamond. Mandeville’s failed compass instantiates the effects of the diamond’s materiality upon humans—effects that Nicols, roughly 300 years later, squeamishly acknowledges even as he seeks to overwrite them. For, if the diamond inhibits the movement of the compass needle, that which directs the traveler, does it not effectively disorient the traveler too?

In a way that resonates with Mandeville’s diamonds, Sara Ahmed beautifully attends to objects’ capacity to (dis/re)orient our apprehension of self and world in her theorization of a “queer phenomenology.” Our engagement with objects, Ahmed argues, sends us along certain paths of affect, perception, and comprehension. Ahmed distills the spatial dimensions of “orientation”: “If we know where we are when we turn this way or that way, then we are orientated. We have our bearings….To be oriented is also to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us to find our way.” 71 (Even, one might add, if that “way” is not the one that we anticipated.) Yet she insists upon the connotative possibilities of the term, pointing too to its resonance within discourses of sexuality and geography—orient as a “direction” faced within the landscape “of our desire”; orient as

70 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1-22, esp. 4. 71 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 1. 21 the etymological descendent “of the Orient or East.” 72 For Ahmed, objects can orient us in a number of ways—directionally, sexually, geographically—all of which determine

“how [we] extend into space,” how we are in the world, and how we understand that position. 73

Interestingly, in the early modern period, “orient” was a word with which people specifically modified gems. As Hillard evinces in the treatise that opened this introduction, “orient” served as an aesthetic marker particular to precious stones. In his discussion of color and gems, Hilliard writes, “…more ther are not which are soe very hard and orient as these five./.Nowe is proved, that the absolute Orient & hardest transparent precious stones of propoer and unmixed cullors, are only five….” 74 The movement in Hilliard’s text from the lowercase “o” of “orient” to the uppercase “O” of

“Orient” evokes the geographical ghosts, to which Ahmed gestures, that haunt the term.

The OED underscores the connection between gems and the East: “Of a pearl or other precious stone, originally one coming from the East….” 75 A gem’s past was part of its beauty, and also part of its brutality, which I explore in Chapter Two. Yet, as the continuation of the OED’s definition suggests, “orient” also had much to do with the stone’s present: “Of a pearl or other precious stone, originally one coming from the East: of superior value and brilliancy, lustrious, precious.” 76 In her edition of Hilliard’s

72 Ahmed, 1, 113; (emphasis Ahmed’s). 73 Ahmed, 5. 74 Nicholas Hillard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning , ed. Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 1983), 37; Emphasis mine 75 "orient, n. and adj.", OED Online. March 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/132525?rskey=KrR9FS&result=1&is Advanced=false (accessed May 07, 2014). 76 Ibid. 22 Treatise, Linda Bradley Salamon additionally glosses “orient” as “iridescent.” 77 While

“superior value” and “precious” situate gems within the cultural contexualization of economic worth, “brilliancy,” “lustrious,” and “iridescent,” all speak to a material quality inherent in the stones that draws us to them. Thus, the “fyve Stones” of which Hilliard writes—the amethyst, the ruby, the sapphire, the emerald, and the Topaz—could orient the observer in multiple directions. But, as I discussed above, to the nature of the diamond alone went the possibility of a confounding “superfluity.” 78 Indeed, for Hilliard and many of the other early modern subjects here compassed, (dis)orientation seemed to be the diamond’s very “ontological condition,” to use Gil Harris’s phrase. 79 In Hilliard’s description of the diamond’s “cullors radient and strange,” one cannot but hear the siren of Ariel’s later call: “But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” 80

As Hilliard makes clear, sea-changes, alterations in direction and expectation, emerge out of the early modern diamond, at times making those that beheld it “strange” in the process.

Certainly, this was true for Mandeville. He offers paragraph after paragraph about the gem: diamond acquisition, diamond formation, diamond attributes, diamond colors,

77 Hilliard, 37. 78 Drawing upon the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen invokes the word “superfluity” in his discussion of art and the nonhuman. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Sex Life of Stone.” From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) 17-38. Please note that the author kindly shared this essay with me in advance of publication. Thus, the pagination that I can here provide differs from that of the published essay. In the version of the essay that I read, the discussion of “superfluity” appears on page 13. 79 Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 2004), 180. 80 William Shakespeare, The Tempest , The Norton Shakespeare , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008), 3064-3115, 1.2.404-05. 23 and diamond authenticity. Mandeville, it seems, cannot stop talking about diamonds. He confesses, “I will speak a little more about diamonds, although I prolong my subject.” 81

This “prolong[ed]…subject” sends Mandeville and his readers along a course quite different from the one promised in the prologue in which he frames his Travels along the straight line of Christian pilgrimage and reconquest of the Holy Land. There, he laments the callowness of European rulers with interests occupied by earthly rather than spiritual

“inheritance”: “But if it please our holy apostolic father…that the landed princes were reconciled and with each of their commons would undertake the holy voyage overseas, I believe it to be certain that in a short time the Promised Land would be restored and placed in the hands of its rightful heirs, the sons of Jesus Christ.” 82 The pages to come offer the “delight” and “pleasure” afforded by a journey to this place of Christian possibility, by the trajectory of redemption. 83 But diamonds make Mandeville tarry. They send him wandering into the byways of a different kind of “delight” and “pleasure,” a different kind of desire. Put differently, diamonds reorient the way in which Mandeville moves through his world.

Here one might point out that Mandeville probably never came across a diamond in India because he probably never came across India itself. Mandeville identifies himself as a knight from St. Albans, England who in 1322 embarked on the extensive travels relayed and relived in his book: “…I, John Mandeville, knight—although I am not worthy, born and raised in England in the town of St Albans, who from there have crossed the sea in the year 1322 on Michaelmas Day and who have since been beyond the

81 Mandeville, 100. 82 Mandeville 4, 5. 83 Mandeville, 5 24 sea for a long time, and have seen and gone around many countries….” 84 However, of

John Mandeville the traveler and author, Higgins writes, “Not only has no trace of a Sir

John Mandeville, or even an acceptable substitute, ever been found, but the only travels recorded in the book belong to others….” 85 Higgins continues, “Insofar as it claims to be something it is not, The Book of John Mandeville is a forgery….” 86 Higgins’s characterization here echoes Stephen Greenblatt’s well-cited summation of Mandeville, delivered in his introduction to Marvelous Possessions : “The authors of the anecdotes with which this book concerns itself were liars—few of them steady liars, as it were, like

Mandeville, but frequent and cunning liars none the less….” 87 Admittedly, a certain amount of irony exists in a fraudulent Mandeville cautioning against “counterfeited” diamonds. 88 But in many ways, a Mandeville who never left his fireside in St. Albans aligns his experience of early modern diamonds with ours. We, potentially like

Mandeville, come to early modern diamonds through texts, through the mediation of language. Yet, as Mandeville demonstrates, such mediation need not deny the materiality of the stone. In fact, the matter of the diamond might reorient our practices of reading and writing, shifting straight trajectories of symbolic and economic interpretation.

The material plasticity of the early modern diamond demands of us greater intellectual flexibility and creativity than the dim shadows of allegorical readings alone can cast. Recent work in the study of material culture, a field that Bruster terms new materialism and that Patricia Fumerton has inaugurated as new new historicism , to an

84 Mandeville, 5 85 Mandeville, Higgins, introduction, ix-xxvi, esp. ix. 86 Mandeville, Higgins introduction, ix 87 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7; Emphasis author’s. 88 Mandeville, 100 25 extent proves instructive in the kind of theorization needed to rematerialize the diamond in English culture and our reading of it. Yet a chasm predicated on a balance toward either the subject or the object appears to have emerged in the scholarship of new materialism. Fumerton’s adoption of new new historicism indicates the influence that new historicism and cultural materialism has had on many of the scholars currently engaged in early modern material studies. As a result, their work has often delivered careful archival research that positions the object within the cultural moment out of which it is constructed. Scholars working under this rubric open up our readings of early modern literature and the world in which it was produced. 89 However, Jonathan Gil

Harris, has rightly critiqued the way in which new new historicism has stilled the object in terms of temporality (and geography). 90 And one might add that quite often new new historicism attends primarily to the relationship of the object to the human. Put differently, the object materializes aspects of the early modern human experience.

Another group of scholars that we might identify as new materialists have moved in an alternate direction. The philosophical developments of thinkers like Jane Bennett,

89 Several collections over the past decade showcase good examples of the kind of material-driven (interdisciplinary) scholarship that new new historicism has made available; See Magreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, ed., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, ed., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); The work of Peter Stallybrass has been particularly integral in redirecting scholarly attention to the materiality of the early modern period and especially influential in my own thinking; See also Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces , ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183-207 and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ed., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 90 Jonathan Gil Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479-491. 26 Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Graham Harman have increasingly gained traction in literary scholarship. 91 Their respective theories of vibrant matter, actor networks, and object oriented ontology have empowered literary scholars to critique the post-Cartesian subject/object divide that we so often bring to texts (especially to medieval and early modern works), resulting in a convincing argument for a material agency that affected and indeed continues to affect the human. 92 However, at times, the theoretical modes of agentic matter allow a revelry in the object to eclipse the humans (and nonhumans) with whom it comes into contact in moments of suffering or celebration or just daily existence.

Here the object can have a tendency to materialize aspects of the early modern object experience.

“Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England” evinces a debt to both of the above engagements with matter, both early modern (and modern). Ultimately, though, the early modern diamond winks out of the gulf of this critical separation. It insists upon its own materiality and its relationship with the human. The early modern diamond was a

91 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse 2 (2007):182-221; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Michel Serres, Genesis , trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 92 Julian Yates’s Latourian-influenced intervention into Renaissance texts has changed the way that I read. I particularly appreciate that Yates rigorously grounds his work in a historical understanding of the period while demonstrating (much like Gil Harris) the theoretical conversations in which early modern texts already engage; See particularly Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Julian Yates, “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, a Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597,” parallax 8 (2002): 47-58; For a well-articulated overview of and savvy intervention in recent trends in medieval studies of “‘objecthood’” (1060), see Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object,” Literature Compass 5/6 (2008):1060-80; See also Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125 (2010): 273-82. 27 multi-faceted thing, sitting uneasily within a theoretical setting that would incorporate it solely into the potentiality of material vibrancy, the nodality of mercantile networks, the withdrawal of object oriented ontology, the cultural distillation of new new historicism, or the rehistoricized commodity of Marxism reinterpreted. All of these possibilities ripple through the early modern diamond, moving in different ways early modern subjects and scholars alike.

***

I begin in Chapter One: Writing Diamond Desire in Reformation England with an early modern orientation toward diamonds entirely lost to us now: diamonds as an object with which one wrote. Writing diamonds resulted from the intersection of the diamond’s natural octahedron (pyramidal) shape and the inability of contemporary cutting techniques to alter that shape. As a result, lapidaries worked with the form of the diamond to develop the “point-cut,” which also happened to yield a stylus that could mark glass. The “point-cut” diamond remained one of the dominant styles well into the

1600s when technological advancements enabled a greater degree of faceting. This chapter focuses on the decades before the cutting developments of the seventeenth century. It attends to the preceding decades in which the limitations of technology shaped a particular kind of diamond desire in a cultural moment that witnessed a reconsideration and reshaping of the subject’s relationship to the material world: the English

Reformation. 93

93 As will become clear in the chapter, I grant the English Reformation a timeline that runs roughly from the 1530s until at the least the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign— although it would not be historical irresponsible to extend it until the final years of Elizabeth’s life (given the worries over succession). Thus, I include within the term 28 I focus upon one particular instance of diamond writing: Elizabeth Tudor’s diamond poetics on a window in Woodstock Castle when she was imprisoned by Queen

Mary I in from 1554 until 1555. I trace the way in which the couplet co-production of

Elizabeth and the diamond touched other bodies and other writings—the writings of

European travelers to England at the close of the sixteenth century, the historiography of

John Foxe in multiple editions of his Acts and Monuments , and a well-known sonnet that

Thomas Wyatt the Elder wrote years before the Woodstock diamond encounter. Poetry provides a particularly interesting place to begin because we so often treat poetry as a genre especially dependent upon the material primarily for the figurative work that it can do. What Elizabeth and Wyatt’s respective poems demonstrate is the way in which the diamond proved integral to poetic writing not only (or not always even primarily) symbolically but also materially. And during the Reformation, the matter of the writing diamond was bound up in desire. However, what this chapter illustrates is the multi- faceted nature of a diamond desire that exceeds many of the modes with which we theorize desire. As it turns out, the story of writing diamond desire in the Reformation is not one that willingly follows a singular course, certainly not a progressive one in terms of narrative or temporality. Diamond desire disorients, rewriting our notions of early modern literature and the time in which it came into being.

Chapter Two: Traveling in Early Modern Diamond Myth and Narrative moves from diamond writing in England to English writing about diamonds in the years preceding and following the country’s efforts to gain a footing in eastern trade. We thus travel from England to India. India existed as the sole global source for the gem until the

English Reformation the Counter Reformation, although one might find it useful to speak of Counter Reformations (plural). 29 discovery of Brazilian diamond deposits in the eighteenth century. 94 For early modern westerners, India and diamonds would have been a well-traced association. Yet English acquisition of Indian diamonds by no means proved a straightforward process. By

European standards, English incursion into the Indian diamond market occurred relatively late. As I discuss in greater detail in both Chapters Two and Three, Venice and

Portugal had been trafficking in Indian diamonds for decades prior to the inaugural trip of the English Turkey Company into India in 1583—a trip that did not go particularly well.

For the next several years, England would struggle to intervene in the Indian diamond mercantile circuit, and even once the island was an established player, diamond trade could be an edgy business. 95

In this sense, England’s early experience of diamond trafficking plots it into recent scholarship interrogating accounts of English dominance as an imperial power from time immemorial. Richmond Barbour has articulated the difficulty of applying a

Saidian model of post-colonialism to early modern England. Said predicates his theory of

English self and Oriental other on the nineteenth-century British realization of empire.

Yet the supposed English power in interactions with the East, frequently staged in

London theaters, existed as, at most, fleeting proto-imperialist instances and often as little more than delusions of grandeur. 96 Scholars have argued that the English populated this

94 South Africa did not assume a dominant role in diamond trafficking until the nineteenth century, which I discuss in greater detail in the chapter. 95 Thanks to Gil Harris for the reminder that diamonds can be “edgy” objects. 96 On this point, see Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theater of the East, 1576-1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia UP, 1999); and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 30 absence of influence with discourses of power. 97 In the case of the diamond, this discourse was the western myth that the English carried with them into (and sometimes tried to carry out of) India. Through an examination of travel narratives, mostly English but continental as well, this chapter will contend with two of these diamond myths: 1) the myth of laborless diamond plentitude awaiting the English and 2) the myth that the Indian diamond could be made an English commodity without affecting the English who sought it. What the travel writings here canvassed—of figures like the English Ralph Fitch, John

Newbery, and William Methwold and the European Marco Polo, Jan Huyghen van

Linschoten, and Jean Baptiste Tavernier—evince are the ways in which the matter of the

Indian diamond disrupts such discursive practice. As Ahmed notes, the objects of our apprehension can enable particular extensions into space, but she cautions against an assumption that these objects will always come when they are called and then achieve that for which they were bidden. 98 The Indian diamond replaces western myth with its own travel narrative—an account of itself and the people and place from which it came quite different from the myth that the English knew and told and that we so often still recount today.

Finally, Chapter Three: Staging Diamond Economies of (Dis)Enchantment considers the diamonds of the early modern English stage. Unlike the genres of poetry

97 See Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions ; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988); To a certain extent, one could include Lloyd Kermode in this grouping. Sharing Mullaney’s interest in theatrical representation of the alien, to an extent, Kermode would seem to agree with Mullaney’s proto-imperialist interpretation. However, Kermode proves advisedly wary about the possibility of “consummately foreclosing” (to use Mullaney’s term; see Mullaney 86) cultures with which the English come into contact. Lloyd Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009). 98 Ahmed, 39. 31 and travel writing (and history too) that comprise the focus of Chapters One and Two, drama presents the possibility of putting literal diamonds before the spectator. While I think it likely that diamonds or some approximation of them appeared as stage properties in a variety of plays in the period, I suggest here that presence need not be a requirement for the matter of the diamond to resonate—a concept that has informed this project throughout. This chapter spends time with two plays that invoke diamonds that do not necessarily necessitate staging, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and William

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice . The diamond’s appearance in both plays arrives in apparent connection to the daughters of Jewish fathers: Abigail, the daughter of

Barabas in Marlowe, and Jessica, the daughter of Shylock in Shakespeare. As a result, scholars have tended to gloss the diamonds primarily as symbolic ciphers for the attributes of and worrisome trade in these two literary women and early modern women more generally. Or, concurrently, particularly in the case of The Merchant of Venice , critics have written the diamond off as an instance of the alienation of the commodity fetish—without materiality or past or connection with the human.

While I am sympathetic with the impulse behind these readings, I argue that they occlude a material dimension of the diamond that would have resonated for the audiences watching these plays. Throughout the early modern period, exclusion from guild systems translated into Jewish involvement in the diamond cutting industry. Moreover, Sephardic

Jews’ connection to Portugal and Spain, as well as to the Ottoman Empire, established

Jewish merchants as substantial figures in the diamond trade—a role that Ashkenazi Jews would eventually gain as well. As I discuss in greater detail, scholarly debate persists about Jewish life in England from the Expulsion in 1290 until the resettlement under

32 Cromwell in 1656. But I think it more than possible that, at the very least, English merchants and jewelers seeking diamonds would have had dealings with Jewish traders and lapidaries on the Continent and that some of the diamonds on English bodies would have been touched by Jewish hands.

The diamonds in The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice (plays set outside of England) insist upon their materiality and disclose the Jewish networks in which that matter circulated. But they deliver sharply distinct accounts of the relationship between the bodies of human and stone. Shakespeare presents us with a diamond whose status as a commodity, a commodity with a history enmeshed in Jewish networks, challenges conceptions of identity in the play and stands to re-enchant our readings of it—akin to the effect that the more personal (as opposed to communal) history of Shylock’s turquoise has had upon criticism in recent years. 99 Yet Shakespeare writes in the wake of a precursor whose diamond holds out no such promise. Marlowe foregrounds the diamond’s relationship to bodies, not only Jewish but also Indian to bear witness to the dark machinations of hegemonic desire. Both diamonds have consequences for the

Jewish daughters linked, however tangentially, to them. Both diamonds have consequences for the way that we read and interpret these respective plays of

Shakespeare and Marlowe and the culture in which they lived. And both diamonds have consequences, or should, for the way that we exist now and continue to exist with the stones. 100

99 I am grateful to the respondents to a paper that I contributed to the SAA seminar “Disenchantments/Re-Enchantments” for highlighting a distinction between the personal and communal history of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice . 100 Please note that the historical details briefly alluded to in the above chapter outlines are all repeated and cited in the chapters themselves. 33 Chapter One: Writing Diamond Desire in Reformation England 101

In 1581, Abraham Fleming published The Diamond of Deuotion, Cut and squared into sixe seuerall points .102 A well-established printer turned “Church of England clergyman,” Fleming’s life work evinces “[t]he religious zeal” of staunch

Protestantism. 103 With the title page of The Diamond of Deuotion , he models for his readers the kind of reading that one should be doing in the wake of the Protestant

Reformation. Here he appeals to the diamond not as the thing itself but as an instantiation of idealized perfection, deploying the trope of the “Paragon” or “figure of comparison” that George Puttenham later describes in The Arte of Enlish Poesie (1589). 104 As

Puttenham explains, the “excellencie” of the praiseworthy subject (or object) “is discouered by paragonizing or setting one to another….” 105 Fleming’s rhetorical diamond guarantees the excellence of the devotional plan placed before the reader. The paper stone’s points signposts for a six-step program: “The Footpath to Feli[citie],” “A Guide to

101 The recent theoretical turn toward surface reading has quietly influenced the development of this chapter (and indeed parts of the introduction as well). An argument for taking texts at their word, as opposed to supposing subversive content beneath the surface, surface reading ultimately moves in a different direction from my project. However, my own interest in reading for a text’s material surface rather than that materiality’s symbolic translation derived, in part, as a tangential off-shoot to my engagement with surface reading theory. See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus introduction to a special issue of Representations attending to surface reading ; Of particular interest is Best and Marcus’s discussion of the literary discipline’s tendency to reproduce Platonic and Christian modes of reading (4); See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations (2009): 1-21. 102 Abraham Fleming, The Diamond of Deuotion, Cut and squared into sixe seuerall points ([London], 1581). 103 “Fleming, Abraham (c. 1552–1607),” Cyndia Susan Clegg in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, , http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9693 (accessed March 11, 2014). 104 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), Huntington STC 20519.5, 195-96. 105 Ibid. 34 Godlines,” “The Schoole of Skill,” “A Swarme of Bee[s],” “A Plant of Pleasure,” “A

Groue of Graces.” 106 The reader of Flemings’s tract then, if “wise and discreet,” traces the lines of the devotional diamond into pathways of redemption. 107 She looks straight through the facets of the stone to words that lead to the Word that leads to God.

Perhaps early modern readers of Fleming’s gem of a book pivoted readily with the author from material diamond to immaterial concept. Yet they equally might have wondered about Fleming’s tropic turn, for the materiality of the diamond invoked does not entirely dissipate. A shimmering ghost remains haunting Fleming’s efforts. A diamond “Cut and squared” points to a style that early modern readers would most likely have recognized as a table cut. A table cut diamond took the form of a square, but often a rectangle, with four right-angled edges and a flat-topped surface, somewhat akin to what we know today as the emerald cut. How could one craft a table cut diamond with “sixe seuerall points”? At the time that Fleming wrote, the matter of the diamond simply would not allow it. Not until the mid-seventeenth century would jewelers learn to work with the diamond to produce the brilliant cut, lauded for the way in which it releases the stone’s

“fire. 108 ” As gemologist Benjamin Zucker emphasizes only 100 years after this advance would “the square brilliant cut” assume a place of prominence and ubiquity in jewelry. 109

106 Fleming, A1r. 107 Fleming, A6v. 108 On the development of the brilliant cut, Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 311; For the terminology of “fire,” see Benjamin Zucker, “A Historical Overview of Diamond Cuts,” Nature of Diamonds , 136-139, esp.138. 109 Zucker, 139 35 One could simply say that Fleming did not know his diamonds, nor did he care to dwell in the vain dross of ornament. Fixation on the stone itself threatened damnation: the devil played in diamond details. Actual diamonds were not the business of a man focused on the godly word of Elizabeth’s post-Reformation England. However, as Matthew

Milner so well argues in his work on the sensorium in Reformation England, even (and perhaps especially) the most ardent reformers recognized the capacity for matter to work on and with the human body in unexpected and sometimes unwelcomed ways. Of the iconoclasm inaugurated by the Reformation, Matthew Milner writes, “The destruction of medieval religiousity has often been seen as proof of Protestantism’s asensual austerity, but the pressures of contemporary sensory theories made it a necessity.” 110 The Cartesian divide between subject and object that exists as our inheritance was not necessarily the property of early modern English men and women, including reformers. In her work on early modern passions, Gail Kern Paster insists upon the permeability between body and world in the period. Describing the liminal space occupied in the culture by “external winds” and internal “human [breath],” Paster writes, “Their interest in the wind is an instance of the pneumatic character of early modern culture, perhaps especially of early modern affective practice. I want to call this relation of inner and outer—evident not only in the wind but in other physical phenomena—a premodern ecology of the passions.” 111

The senses opened the human body up to the influence of worldy things—worldy things

110 Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 4. 111 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8, 9. 36 that, like the wind to which Paster attends, were not necessarily static in their form. 112

And the things of the world did not always do, or always do completely, the kind of symbolic bidding to which a writer like Fleming might have tried put them.

This chapter thinks through diamonds and writing in the Reformation years that preceded and ultimately engendered Fleming’s text and its difficulties. The works here considered are secular rather than religious, but they are crafted by Protestant figures positioned on the cusp of and in the midst of the Reformation. As with Fleming, they too get tangled up with the matter of the diamond because the matter of the diamond actually produces their writing, quite literally in the case of Elizabeth Tudor. Aside from the table cut that Flemings evokes, the other diamond cut ascendant during this period (the precursor to the table cut) was the point cut, a style that developed out of the stone’s natural octahedron form—a shape comprised of two pyramids, one upright and one inverted, conjoined at their base. Termed “‘writing rings’” or “‘scribbling rings,’” the point-cut diamond ring yielded a jeweled stylus. Coupled with the diamond’s notorious hardness, the sharpness of the cut enabled a “‘writing matter’” capable of marking other materials in ways unavailable to instruments reliant upon ink. 113 As Juliet Fleming writes,

“The practice of writing on windows is attested both in poems such as Herbert’s ‘The

Posy”…and in the survival from the period of inscribed window panes, and of ‘writing

112 For an argument against a static critical handling of early modern objects, see Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair.” 113 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2001), 55; Fleming is of course nodding to Jonathan Goldberg’s seminal work of that title; See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter from the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). On diamond writing wrings, see also Finlay, Jewels , 346. 37 rings’ (diamonds set in high bevels with one point outwards) designed to mark glass.” 114

Thus, diamonds were not simply an object that one wrote about in Reformation and Post-

Reformation England, tried to write through, but also something that one wrote with. And the chirographic potential of the gem proves a feature of the poetry here considered and of the way that contemporary (Protestant) historiographers, like John Foxe, framed that poetry’s production, or at least, attempted to do so.

When I initially began to research this chapter, I envisioned its trajectory as a vector from the diamond writings in Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder’s sonnet “Who So List to Hounte,” likely written in the years directly before the English Reformation, to

Protestant travellers’ reflections at the close of the sixteenth century (essentially post-

Reformation) on Elizabeth Tudor’s diamond poetics at Woodstock Castle circa 1554. The writing diamonds would disclose a broader story about Protestant relation to matter, unfolding this narrative along a straight line of chronology. The diamond of Wyatt would somehow prove the type of the stone that Elizabeth employed at Woodstock while she was imprisoned there, and it would inform the accounts of Elizabeth’s Woodstock diamond given by historiographer John Foxe and Europeans journeying to Woodstock to witness the gemological writings of the once prisoner now English queen. I found this narrative impossible to write. It was impossible to write because I had not accounted for the movement of diamond desire. By this, I mean that I had not fully realized the ways in which writing diamonds provoked and directed a multiplicity of subjective desires and relational possibilities. In the above quote from Juliet Fleming, the implication is that the point cut diamond writing ring resulted from early moderns’ desire “to mark glass.” In

114 Juliet Fleming, 55.

38 actuality, the opposite was true. Early moderns wrote on glass because the materiality of the diamond, what the stone would allow, shaped their desire. Historian Diana

Scarisbrick has documented the relatively slow advancement of early modern cutting technologies for the diamond. Not until the second half of the seventeenth century did the brilliant cut emerge. She writes, “…the uncompromising octahedron presented a challenge to jewellers creating settings for it. This is the point from which all diamond jewelry designs and faceting techniques had to evolve.” 115 Interestingly, the hardness of the diamond translated into a fluidity of desire around writing with the stone.

In his work on the role of oranges in the escape of Catholic prisoners from the

Tower in 1597, Julian Yates describes the orange as a node from which spreads and around which circulates a network of desire. He writes, “In 1597, to like oranges was, quite by accident, to become a fellow-traveller with laundresses in search of cleansers and Jesuits on the look-out for invisible ink. To like oranges was to align one’s footsteps with everyone who desired oranges in London, for whatever reason.” 116 The desiring network to which oranges direct Yates resonates with the iterations of diamond writing here considered. Yet while oranges reveal for Yates a collision of desires from a religiously divergent group (Catholics and Protestants), the writing diamond(s) that I examine gesture toward a proliferation of desires elicited within Reformers. The diamond cuts each of their desires differently. As a result, I locate not a singular “reformed” orientation toward the stone, a compass line pointing due north, but rather multiple,

115 Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty , fig.416. 116 Julian Yates, “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, a Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597,” parallax 8 (2002): 47-58, esp. 54. 39 interlocking facets. What follows is a series of vignettes, permutations of desire, told the way that the diamond would have it.

A Study in Diamond Desire I

A young woman and a diamond before a window. Hand and stone move along the glass. Words appear:

Much suspected by me,

Nothing proved can be,

Quod Elizabeth prisoner 117

The scene vanishes. Words, window, diamond, girl—all are gone. Ghosts of desires remain—the same ghosts that had always been there, ferryman for bodies inside and outside of the window frame. They flitted across the prisoner’s fingers encircling the gem. They eddied in the writings of the historiographer who later invoked the diamond marks. They moaned in the hearts of those who came to witness the place of inscription.

These hauntings breathe out a lost poetics of the diamond—a material verse that at once shapes desires and absorbs them into itself. Why did the prisoner turn toward the diamond? What did those looking on, looking back, hope to see? What want we of future and past queen and stone?

A Study in Diamond Desire II

Between May 1554 and April 1555, a diamond held by Elizabeth Tudor etched the above words into a window at Woodstock Palace, the place of the Princess’s

117 I cite this poem throughout the chapter in multiple versions. Unless otherwise indicated, the above version serves as the control text, which is based off of the poem as found in the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments . See Elizabeth I, “Written with a Diamond,” Elizabeth I Collected Works , ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 46. 40 imprisonment. Queen Mary I had consigned her young half sister to Woodstock following the fugacious uprising in Kent—an uprising in which Elizabeth apparently had played no part but for which Mary distrusted her all the more. 118 Mary placed Elizabeth under the watch of Sir Henry Bedingfeld and the relative isolation of life at Woodstock.

Susan Doran writes, “But Woodstock was no place of freedom…He [Bedingfeld] permitted her neither visitors nor messages and referred all her requests back to the council for approval.” 119 While Doran acknowledges the limitations circumscribing

Elizabeth’s life in Oxfordshire, coupled with the strains of illness and inevitable anxiety over her predicament, the historian notes as well the compromises that the Princess succeeded in eliciting from Bendingfeld. Among these was the privilege of submitting letters to her half sister and her privy councilors—letters that would have been written on paper with quill and ink.120 Perhaps Bendingfeld furnished supplies solely for these instances of royal supplication. 121 Perhaps Elizabeth maintained among whatever personal effects she was allowed a cache of the usual writing materials. Yet whether from necessity or choice, she availed herself of a diamond to produce the window verse.

Fleming has well documented “[t]he ostenstatious materiality of sixteenth-century literary writing,” cataloging the divergent surfaces and implements on and through which early moderns created poetry. Fleming identifies in the period a flexible apprehension of the relationship between matter and poetry, indeed between materiality and life, that informs my project as well. She writes, “To contemplate a song of pearly, or a ‘poysee’

118 On Elizabeth’s imprisonment, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232; Susan Doran, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 42-45. 119 Doran, 45. 120 Doran, 45. 121 As we shall see, Foxe frames Elizabeth’s access to writing materials in this way. 41 (‘posy’, ‘poesie’) ‘made of letters of fine gold’—or, alternatively, a miniature book in an ornamental binding designed to be worn at the waist—is to be unable to distinguish between a poem, a jewel, an acoustical structure and a feat of embroidery. During the

English Renaissance, language entered into relations with the material world that are sometimes surprising to modern readers.” 122 Thus, Elizabeth’s move to diamond and window, even if pen and paper had been readily available, situates her within the writing ecology of her time. This does not mean, however, that difference in media did not exist.

Fleming perhaps does not account enough for the ways in which different kinds of matter orient the body in distinct ways. Nor does she entirely attend to desire: why one might want to write with stone in the first place.

So often, when we put pen to paper, we commit their material presence to oblivion, ignoring their role in the production of our words. We do so even as the pen presses into the worn notch on our middle finger—even as the ink smears across the side of our pinky finger, if one is left handed as I am. Diamond writing promises no such material forgetting. To write with a diamond is to carve, to enable one kind of matter to rough up another rather than simply setting ink upon its surface. 123 Diamond writing requires work, a shared labor between human and gem. As Elizabeth travailed with the diamond, the stone would have oriented her attention to the window on which they wrote together. Directed by the diamond, she might have seen through the waves of the glass the distorted image of “the milkmaid” whose freedom she supposedly “envied.” 124 Would the girl’s existence, the dailiness of her life, come before Elizabeth otherwise? Thus,

122 Juliet Fleming, 10. 123 It would be different too than writing with the charcoal that I reference below, as my mom pointed out to me. 124 Doran, 45. 42 Elizabeth might have seen another self “through a glass darkly.” 125 Yet she would have felt too. The touch of the diamond brought with it the touch of the glass, a resistance to the mark even as it participated in it. Like the “filthy window” of A.S. Byatt’s The

Biographer’s Tale , invoked by Bill Brown, the casement of Woodstock claimed

Elizabeth’s attention. 126

A young woman and a diamond before a window. Hand and stone move along the glass. Together they create a poem:

Much suspected by me,

Nothing proved can be,

Quod Elizabeth prisoner

Viewed through a post-Cartesian lens of subjective experience, the lines read as the pronouncement of Elizabeth’s innocence and Elizabeth’s misery. The diamond and the window are incidental. However, this kind of reading overwrites the slippery strangeness of the lines’ syntax. The lines present at least two different meanings: 1) Although some individuals suspect Elizabeth of “much” treason, they cannot prove it; 127 or 2) Elizabeth is suspicious of the notion that nothing can be proved (perhaps in terms of her own guilt or perhaps more philosophically). Neither statement, of course, affirms Elizabeth’s

125 First Corinthians 13:12, King James Bible , “Oxford Text Archive,” “University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, last modified February 18, 1997, accessed May 14, 2014, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=5072031. 126 Brown, 1

127 During the period “by” deployed in the above formulation often meant “against,” as indicated in the entry for “by” as preposition or adverb in the OED: “with pejorative force: Against. Obs. exc. Dial.”; See “by, prep. and adv.”. OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/25523?rskey=jKVcpj&result=4&isAd vanced=false (accessed May 10, 2014).

43 guiltlessness. The passive voice construction of these lines contributes to this semiotic confusion and signals the decentering of the subject. To whom belong the words? The poesy itself, to adopt Fleming’s term, attests to a shared endeavor. Without the diamond, without the glass, there would be no poem.

That the diamond directs Elizabeth’s course, that it informs what she sees and feels, that it, coupled with the window, enable artistic endeavor—this tells us something about how early moderns moved through the world with diamonds, how they shaped human subjectivity in ways now lost to us. But it does not account entirely for the desire to touch a diamond, to write with it. Out of the sterility of imprisonment, the anxiety of mundaneness and alteration, the diamond offers Elizabeth both creativity and protest, yet its does so with a particular promise: that of permanence. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen beautifully theorizes the kind of desire that brings Elizabeth and diamond together as

“geographesis.” 128 He writes, “Because of its inhuman endurance stone insinuates itself into human yearnings for immortality…for the preservation of collective history and personal memory…for the survival beyond the horizon of our own bodily impermanence of the stories we tell.” 129 The possibility of “bodily impermanence” must have loomed over Elizabeth. Prior to arriving at Woodstock, she had spent time in the Tower—the same structure that housed the leaders of the rebellion before to their execution. In a moment of ascendant Catholicism, Elizabeth adhered to the Protestantism first planted by

128 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Sex Life of Stone.” From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) 17-38, esp. 16. Please note that the author kindly shared this essay with me in advance of publication. Thus, the pagination that I can here provide differs from that of the published essay. Jeffrey Cohen’s work on both stone and diamonds, as well as his classroom lectures and seminars, has profoundly shaped the direction of this project, particularly his attention to the liquidity of diamonds. 129 Cohen, “The Sex Life of Stone,” 5 44 her father and realized by her half brother. Her desultory shows of Catholic practice did little to bely her convictions. Government-identified heretics could burn on the kindling of their faith. Others escaped the flames only under the smokescreen of self-exile. 130

Moreover, during the period of her imprisonment, Elizabeth suffered from nephritis. 131

Amidst the mercurial whims of human physiology and psychology, the diamond shines out. Here before. Here after. Of geological time, Cohen muses, “Stones inhabit a temporality alien to us, one in which the flow of years may as well be an outpouring of nanoseconds….” 132 Elizabeth wants the diamond to interpolate her into its own

(a)history. The hardness of a diamond, its scratchings in a glass—the pledges of a seeming crystalline permanence. I was here: We were here , Elizabeth writes with her diamond. Let me turn stone. Let me be a monument that lives.

A Study in Diamond Desire III

On the grounds of Blenheim Palace, somewhere between a twenty-first century trail and a bridge constructed by the eighteenth-century architect Sir John Vanbrugh, sits a squat, stone monument. At first glance, the marker looks ancient, but its sharp, squared edges and decoration suggest a more recent provenance. Mottled with yellow and orange lichens, the plinth’s inscription refuses easy reading. But one side of the stone bears the following sentences: “‘Here stood the Royal Manor House of Woodstock [f]inally destroyed circa 1720. This stone was erected 1961.’” On the opposite side of the plinth,

130 On excutions and exile, see Doran, 37; Guy 238. 131 Doran, 40. 132 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 5. 45

Fig. 1 : Front face of Woodstock Palace plinth on the grounds of Blenheim Palace. Photograph courtesy of Antonia Keaney, Education Officer, Blenheim Palace, England.

46 another date appears, the second Roman numeral so worn that one must touch the grooves to discern it: MDCCCCII [See Fig. 1]. According to John Forster, archivist to the current Duke of Marlborough, in 1902 the ninth Duke of Marlborough installed the plinth to memorialize the Grand Avenue’s rehabilitation. At a later date, he had the monument transplanted to its current location. This modern, lithic commemoration is all that reminds of Woodstock Palace, and it would appear that in its initial conception it was not intended to remind of Woodstock at all.133 Nothing remains of the place itself where

Elizabeth wrote with a diamond.

In the years following Elizabeth’s imprisonment and subsequent coronation, the deterioration of Woodstock, already underway by 1554, continued. 134 Ian Dunlop, writing one year after the installation of the Woodstock monument, observes, “The dilapidation of the palace was a long drawn out and intermittent process. Owing to the attractions offered by its hunting, Woodstock retained the royal favour long after it had ceased to be worthy of housing a Court.” 135 In the early 1700s, Vanbrugh began construction on

133 The above information derives from an email correspondence (beginning on April 9, 2014) with Antonia Keaney, Education Officer at Blenheim Palace. In our initial email exchange, Ms Keaney kindly provided me with the inscriptions for the plinth. Subsequently, she walked out to the plinth and physically “traced” the date of MDCCCCII for confirmation and spoke with John Forester about the history of the plinth, conveying his information to me. I am deeply grateful for Ms. Keaney’s kindness and assistance. 134 Simon Pipe, “Woodstock’s lost royal palace,” “BBC,” last modified October 23, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/content/articles/2007/10/17/glyme_feature.shtml, n.p. 135 Ian Dunlop, Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I (London, Jonathan Cape, 1962), 16; Traveler Thomas Platter (see below) observes the diminished state of Woodstock by the end of the sixteenth century, yet he stresses Elizabeth’s desire to maintain the palace: “After this we saw the king’s hall and his chamber very poorly constructed and without proper tapestry, since the queen very rarely comes here, and has no great inclination to live here again, nevertheless, she does not wish to let the place deay, and orders the building to be kept in repair” (222). See Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England , ed. and trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937). 47 Blenheim Castle for the Earl of Marlborough, John Churchill. What subsisted of

Woodstock partook of the grounds for the new structure. According to Dunlop, possessed of “a veneration for the historic and a sharp eye for the picturesque,” Vanbrugh sought to retain the ruins of Woodstock as a view from Bleinheim’s “northern window.” 136

However, the Churchills did not find in the royal rubble the charm that Vanbrugh there discovered. 137 Within two decades, the palace of Woodstock was completely gone: “Every stone was removed.” 138

Today people meander through Bleinham Park to view Vanbrugh’s architectural wonder, built out of contestation, debt, and litigation. 139 At the close of the sixteenth century, tourists arrived at the grounds of Woodstock to locate what remained of a recent past. The imprisoned Princess was now Queen. Protestantism established, although worries of succession played in the unmarried Elizabeth’s absence of an offspring.

Almost half a century separated Queen Elizabeth I from the diamond poetics engendered by Elizabeth Tudor and stone at Woodstock. A length of time to be sure, but not so very long to render preservation of Elizabeth’s quarters there unlikely—particularly as

Elizabeth herself might have found her time at Woodstock of use for cultivating her

136 Dunlop, 17. 137 Dunlop, 17; See also Pipe, n.p. 138 Pipe, n.p. Dunlop dates the destruction of Woodstock to 1723; See Dunlop, 17. 139 For the tumultuous building of Bleinham, see the respective entries for Churchill’s wife, Sarah Churchill, and Sir John Vanbrugh in the ODNB; “Churchill , Sarah, duchess of Marlborough (1660–1744),” James Falkner in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5405 (accessed May 10, 2014); “Vanbrugh, Sir John (1664–1726),” Kerry Downes in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28059 (accessed May 10, 2014). 48 monarchical narrative, as Doran seems to suggest. 140 One assumes that some of the visitors to Elizabeth’s chambers at Woodstock would have been English. Yet the records that we have derive from the travel journals of foreigners. Between 1598 and 1600, three men from the Continent travelled respectively throughout England and recorded their experiences: Paul Hentzner of Silesia (1598), Thomas Platter of Switzerland (1599), and

Zden ěk Brtnickýz Valdštejna (circa 1600) of Morovia. All appear to have had ties to

Protestantism. All came before Queen Elizabeth in one of her presence chambers. All visited Woodstock. And all wrote of the poetry that they found adorning Elizabeth’s former chambers. None of them encountered verses crafted with a diamond.

Published in Latin in Nuremberg in 1612, Paul Hentzner’s Itinerarium

Germaniae, Galliae, Angliae, Italiae recounts the travels that he made as “‘tutor’” to

Christopher Rehdiger, the son of Silesian nobility.141 Not until 1757 would Horace

Walpole publish an English translation of Hentzner’s diary, achieved by Richard Bentley, under the title of A Journey into England by Paul Hentzner .142 After a lengthy description of Oxford and its colleges, Hentzner relates his day trip to the nearby Woodstock Palace.

Of Queen Elizabeth’s relationship to the place, he reports:

In this very palace the present reigning queen Elizabeth, before she was confined

to the Tower, was kept prisoner by her sister Mary; while she was detained here in

140 Doran, 45 141 “Hentzner, Paul (1558–1623),” L. L. Ford in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/92460 (accessed May 10, 2014). 142 For this publication history of Hentzner, see “Hentzner, Paul (1558–1623),” L. L. Ford in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; I follow the Wapole edition of Hentzner’s work; See Paul Hentzner, A Journey into England , ed. and trans. Horace Wapole (Strawberry Hill, 1757), accessed May 10, 2014 https://archive.org/stream/journeyintoengla00hentrich#page/n7/mode/2up. 49 the utmost peril of her life, she wrote with a piece of charcoal the following

verses, composed by herself, upon a window-shutter…. 143

Hentzner then reproduces the poem “O Fortune! how thy restless wavering state.” He records nothing of Elizabeth’s writing diamond: nothing of the couplet co-created. The ten-line “O Fortune!” offers a lamentation of wrongful imprisonment and a hope of retribution, a lyric production foregrounding the “I” of a beleaguered and determined subject. Gone is the poetics of a self displaced into the temporality of the diamond. A material irony takes its place: the transience of charcoal, a compromised form of carbon whose traces tend to smudge, survives the forever of the diamond, unadulterated carbon whose hardness permanently carves. 144

Despite Hentzner’s chronological misstep—Elizabeth’s sojourn in the Tower preceded her time at Woodstock—we have no reason to suspect the tutor of fabrication.

In his entry on Hentzner for the ODNB, L.L. Ford credits his “simple commentary on the manners, pastimes, and rituals he observed at first hand, regardless of Hentzner’s

“renderings of English place names” and occasional “factual errors.” 145 Moreover, Platter and Valdštejna (or Waldenstein, as he himself renders his name in his travels) 146 confirm

143 Hentzner, 66 144 Juliet Fleming alludes to the “consequential material properties” of divergent forms of ink and/or writing implements: “Blood, charcoal, marking stones of all colours, smoke, lead, diamonds and glass also have consequential material properties of their own; and writing in each of these media could invoke the over-determined terms of ‘shade’ or ‘shadow’ to address the fact and consequence of its own inscription” (71-72). See Juliet Fleming. 145 “Hentzner, Paul (1558–1623),” L. L. Ford in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 146 As editor and translator, G.W. Gross notes, Valdštejna kept his diary in Latin and rendered his own name in Latin on the “first page” (1). Groos follows this spelling, as do I within the body of my text. For the following footnote and in the works cited, I use what today would be considered the Czech spelling; See Zden ěk Brtnickýz Valdštejna, The 50 Hentzner’s account. Arriving at Woodstock only a year after Hentzner, the Swiss physician Platter remarks particularly on “the three apartments” in which Elizabeth spent her captivity. 147 Platter writes, “In the foremost or first apartment I was shown the following English verses on a window-shutter written by the queen herself with charcoal, since she was allowed neither paper, pen, nor ink.”148 Platter then supplies his reader with the same poem that Hentzner transcribes: “Oh fortune thy Wresting wavering state.” Like

Hentzner before him, Platter references the charcoal implement of inscription and the wooden medium of the window shutter, providing the additional detail that these materials supplied the want of ink and paper. And as with the Silesian traveller who preceded him, Platter mentions no diamond poetics.

Both Hentzner and Platter underscore that Elizabeth produced the poem in

English, even if Hentzner’s translator Bentley does not. The replication of the English poem in Hentzner’s Latin and Platter’s German seems to have presented no small difficulties. The editors of the University of Chicago’s edition of Elizabeth’s collected works, Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, assert the errors of Hentzner and Platter’s respective transcriptions. They write, “Platter’s and Hentzner’s versions [of

“O Fortune”] are so garbled that they can only be restored conjecturally, and modern

Diary of Baron Waldstein, ed. and trans. G.W. Groos, introduction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 10-22. 147 According to the ODNB entry for Platter, his travels, written in a Swiss variant of German, were not published during his lifetime, remaining a kind of family heirloom; See “Platter, Thomas (1574–1628),” Vivienne Larminie in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, May 2005, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53269 (accessed May 10, 2014). 148 Platter, 220. Both Platter and Hentzner foreground the English of Elizabeth’s verses, even if Hentzner’s translator does not. 51 versions of these texts derive from eighteenth-century attempts at reconstruction.” 149

However, to the third traveller, Waldstein, they grant a cleaner copy. A student at the

University of Strasbourg, the Morovian Waldstein commenced the travels that occupy his diary shortly after turning eighteen. 150 He arrived in England in June of 1600, and by early July he too went sightseeing at Woodstock. Waldstein comments on the lovely situation of the place, but he identifies “the room” of Elizabeth’s imprisonment as the

Palace’s principal attraction because of what it still houses:

The thing above all to see in this palace is the room in which the present Queen

Elizabeth was kept prisoner for a whole four years by order of her sister Mary.

Even now one can read her verses in English, written on the wall in Elizabeth’s

own handwriting. 151

Waldstein then supplies the same ten lines of “verses in English” given by both Hentzner and Platter, in addition to the signature that the preceding diarists also offer. Unlike

Hentzner and Platter, he reproduces the poem in English first and then offers a Latin translation. And in Waldstein’s copy exists an additional line following Elizabeth’s signature, the addendum of which merits reproducing Waldstein’s transcription in its entirety:

Oh Fortune, thy wresting wavering state

Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit,

Whose witness this present prison late

Could bear, where once was joy flown quite.

149 Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I Collected Works , 45n1. 150 Valdštejna, Groos, introduction, 11. 151 Valdštejna, 117. 52 Thou causedst the guilty to be loosed

From lands where innocents were enclosed,

And caused the guiltless to be reserved,

And freed those that death had well deserved.

But all herein can be naught wrought;

So God grant to my foes as they have thought.

Finis. Elisabeth a prisoner. 1555 152

Much suspected by me, but nothing proved can be.

After the end, a coda of sorts. Elizabeth’s diamond couplet returns. However, the poetic revenant arrives uncoupled: a single line in place of a couplet, an afterthought in place of the glass co-creation of diamond and human. Waldstein continues, “They say that she wrote other things too with a diamond on one of the windows, but these inscriptions no longer exist.” 153

If Waldstein wandered to the window, he saw in it no trace of diamond poetry.

Nor did verse ornament the wood casing around the glass. Instead, only a year after

Platter’s visit, the poem “Oh Fortune,” most likely written in a material like charcoal, had migrated to a wall—the words of Elizabeth and gem joining it as a silent, unrecognized postscript. What are we to make of the mobility of this morphing lyric? Marcus, Mueller, and Rose suspect that Elizabeth’s material verses were being quietly replicated: “We conjecture that by the time of Waldstein’s visit in 1600, Elizabeth’s original writing had faded to the point that both of her Woodstock poems may have been reproduced seriatim

(and with some variations in wording) on a wall of her prison chamber for the edification

152 Valdštejna, 117, 119. 153 Valdštejna, 119. 53 of the many visitors to Woodstock.” 154 “For edification” perhaps, but also for the requisites of tourism, the sustainment of Elizabeth’s narrative (past and present and future), and an acknowledgment of a desire for a material presence—even in the wake of

Reformation. Would “Eizabeth’s original writing” in diamond have “faded”? Did it wear with time or touch, the channels in the glass becoming less distinct? Or was the glass of the window pane simply replaced, either out of necessity or novelty? It is interesting to speculate why a Woodstock caretaker or an agent of Elizabeth would not have retraced the lines of the once and future queen’s diamond verse. Did cost or availability direct the seemingly ephemeral choice of charcoal, erasable and reproducible? If a later hand had marked out the poetic space of Elizabeth and the diamond, on another pane with another diamond, would the action have answered the yearning made present through absence in

Waldestein: “They say that she wrote other things too with a diamond...”? Would it have answered our desire, mine?

Much suspected by me, but nothing proved can be. Words appear and disappear and reappear. A man who was the young Waldenstein in prison in another castle,

Spilberk in Brno. 155 It has been twenty years since he stood amidst the ghosts of Queen

Elizabeth’s past, the diamond that had flown from the window. The Protestant government of Frederick Elector of Palatine and his English wife Elizabeth, daughter to

King James I, has fallen to “the militantly Catholic Archduke Ferdinand.” 156 Unlike

Elizabeth I, he dies, in 1623, without regaining his freedom, a believer in a religion of word over thing, of signifier transcended by signified: “The sin of Judah is written with a

154 Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I’s Collected Works, 45-46n1. 155 Valdštejna, Groos, introduction. 12, 17 156 Valdštejna, Groos, introduction, 12. 54 pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart….” 157

A Study in Diamond Desire IV

A young woman and a diamond before a window. Hand and stone move along glass. The Tudor princess, the gem, the shared couplet become the stuff of Protestant matyrology—our source of this particular instance of diamond poetics. Less than ten years after Elizabeth’s imprisonment and subsequent ascension to the throne, John Foxe published in the first edition of Acts and Monuments (1563) an account of the Queen’s time at Woodstock that closes with reference to the diamond writings. He records:

In her imprisonment at Woodstock, these verses she wrot wi[th] her Diamond in a

glas window

Much suspected by mee,

Nothing proued can be.

Quod Elisabeth the prisoner. 158

Acts and Monuments saw four printings (the subsequent editions both marked, and sometimes marred, by revision) during Foxe’s life: 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583. 159 In this

157 Jeremiah 17.1, King James Bible , “Oxford Text Archive,” “University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, last modified February 18, 1997, accessed May 11, 2014, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=2878515. 158 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, [1563]), Huntington STC 11222, fol. 1714. 159 These dates are provided by the University of Sheffield’s “The Acts and Monuments Online” (TAMO). TAMO provides searchable, online editions of the 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583 printings of Foxe’s work. The cite makes comparison between the editions a manageable affair. I have thus made frequent recourse to it. When citing from the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments , I follow STC 11222, as cited in note 126. However, when citing from the subsequent editions (through 1583), I rely upon the texts provided by TAMO, as I will indicate; See The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO 55 earliest edition, the episode of diamond poetry appears in the section detailing the reign of Elizabeth. Whether wittingly or not, in this early effort at writing the life of a living monarch (no simple task, as Foxe notes in the section’s introduction: “…albeit I am not ignoraunt howe hard a matter it is to intermeddle with princes lyues, themseules yet being aliue…”), Foxe instructs us in how to read this diamond incident by preceding it with another report of Princess Elizabeth and gems. 160

Claiming the right to relay “That which I haue sene and red…without supition” about the now Queen Elizabeth, Foxe confides the Tudor princess’s disdain for ornament, particularly for the wearing of jewels. He writes, “…seauen yeares after her fathers d[e]athe shee hadde so little pride of stomacke, so little delight in glittering gases of the worlde, in gaye apparel, riche attire, and precious jewelles, that in all that tyme shee neuer loked vpon those that her father lefte her….”161 “[O]nely once” in the years following the deaths of her father and brother, Foxe confesses, did Elizabeth, contrary to her own inclinations, adorn herself with bejeweled vanities. He continues:

And moreouer after that, so little gloried in the same, that ther cam neither gold

nor stone vpon her head, till her sister enforced her to laye of her former

soberness, and beare her company in her glittering gaines: yea and then she so

(HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), accessed May 11, 2014, http//www.johnfoxe.org; See also “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Thomas S. Freeman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10050 (accessed May 11, 2014). 160 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, fol. 1710. 161 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, fol. 1710. 56 ware it, as euery man might see, that her body bare that which her harte

mysliked. 162

Elizabeth’s subsequent refusal to allow “gold” or “stone” to touch her body testifies to her Protestant godliness, whereas Mary’s insistence that both she and her half sister display gems demonstrates the material waywardness of Catholicism. Of course, jewelry was not a religious object akin to the roods or visual and statuary iconography that

Thomas Cromwell began to dismantle under the reign of Henry VIII. As Matthew Milner cautions, an idolatrous orientation to the secular things of the world proved worrisome for

Protestants and Catholics: “Regardless of their religious differences, for both reformers and their opponents the sensible experience of falsity or deception was evil and caused sin….” 163 Yet it suited Foxe’s purposes and convictions to posit Mary and her

Catholicism as tarrying inappropriately with, overinvesting in, decadent ornament.

Moreover, unlike Elizabeth, Mary martialled no boundary between inside and outside, spirit and body, self and stone. As a result, Catholics like Mary left themselves open to being moved, both affectively and phenomenologically, by things, and this movement did not lead toward God and salvation. In the Elizabeth with which Foxe presents us, we find the reformer’s eschewal of the dangerous stuff of the external world and the turn inward that directed the believer’s attention upward. The Elizabeth of Foxe rigorously polices the space between internal and external: “Wherein the vertuous prudence of this

Princes…wel considered true nobility to consist not in circumstances of the body: but in substance of the hart not in suche thinges which decke the body, but in that which

162 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, fol. 1710. 163 Milner, 4. Milner rigorously argues for the sensuous aspect of Protestantism, highlighted by the fear the “evangelicals” (to use Milner’s term) had about the body’s susceptibility to the material world (3-4). 57 dignifieth the mind, shining and blazing more bright then pearle or stone, be it neuer so precious.” 164 The Catholic Mary might foist diamonds onto the body of Elizabeth, yet the future Protestant Queen kept the gems at a distance, never allowing their glimmer to eclipse the diaphaneity of her spirit.

This moment thus creates a diptych with the instance of Elizabeth’s diamond writing that Foxe captures a few pages later. Elizabeth’s rejection of sparkling ornament informs our reading of her diamond poetics. Within the confines of Woodstock,

Elizabeth’s diamond exists not as an aesthetic or fashionable accessory but as a thing of use. Foxe underscores Elizabeth’s material deprivation at Woodstock. Bereft of pen, ink, and paper, the princess was denied means of communication with the world beyond the walls. As Foxe details, when Elizabeth procured permission to write to Mary and her

Privy Council, Bedingfield furnished and guarded the necessary supplies: “…sir Henry

Benifield brought her penne, incke, and paper : and standing by her while she wrote

(which he straightly obserued) all wayes she being wery….” 165 In Foxe’s telling, with these commodities whisked away, Elizabeth has no means of conveying her narrative other than her diamond. The diamond partakes not of the “glittering gaines” prized by the

Catholic Mary. Instead, it serves as the vehicle through which Elizabeth avers her innocence.

Interestingly, in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments , Elizabeth’s diamond writing occurs at an unspecificed time during her stay at Woodstock, simply “In her imprisonment” there. Elizabeth’s engagement with “her diamond” distinguishes her from Mary’s improper fetishization of jewels. But Foxe does not necessarily present the

164 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, fol. 1710. 165 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, fol. 1713. 58 diamond couplet as a response to provocation or a simple mark of defiance. Directly before Foxe reports of Elizabeth’s diamond writing, he relays the efforts by “Spaniards”

(presumably Catholic) in Philip and Mary’s court to obtain Elizabeth’s release. For Foxe, the Spanish pleas and Philip’s eventual persuasion by them puts into relief the villainy of the English (also presumably Catholic) advising the court. The result proves a complicated portrayal of state and faith. Neither nationality nor religion act as stable categories that ensure accurate interpretation. To an extent, this intercession serves to disrupt the straight telos into which Foxe seems to write Mary’s jewels and Elizabeth’s diamond, the damnation of Catholic ostentation superceded by Protestant use. Even if under the aegis of a condemnation of fellow English, Foxe’s revelation of the generosity of foreign Catholics toward Elizabeth, framed in terms of courtesy, engenders an affective response in the reader—a response echoed in the diamond poetics that it introduces if not engenders. Elizabeth’s diamond poetics follows, not as a response to freedom but as a similar moment of unexpected community and communion. In the touch of woman and stone, the reader is moved—an eddy of desire amidst the driving current of

Protestant revelation. Foxe corrects such textual wandering in the subsequent editions of his work by resetting Elizabeth’s diamond.

In the three remaining editions published in Foxe’s lifetime (1570, 1576, and

1583), Elizabeth’s experience as Marian prisoner and her diamond writing migrate into the portion of the work attending to Mary’s reign, highlighting Elizabeth’s status as living

Protestant martyr. Foxe balances Elizabeth’s diamond couplet much more carefully.

Absent are the “courteous” Spaniards, who precede but do not provoke Elizabeth’s

59 diamond poetics. 166 Instead, Foxe presents men affiliated with the Kent uprising now held in the Tower. During questioning and torture, these men are made guarantees if they will only implicate Elizabeth: “Where moreouer is to be noted, that during the prisonment of this Lady and Princesse, one M. Edmunde Tremayne was on the Racke, and M.

Smithwike, and diuers other in the Tower were examined, and diuers offers made to th[em] to accuse the giltles Lady, being in her captiuitie.” 167 Despite such measures, the prisoners provide no information that could ensnare Elizabeth. According to Foxe, while

Elizabeth was held at Woodstock, she learned through secret communication with John

Gayer of the State’s inability to build a case against her. A paucity of evidence (which in

Foxe’s account might translate into a testament of innocence) rather than the machinations of well-meaning Spanish Catholics ensures Elizabeth’s release. And this freedom, coupled with its cause, prompt Elizabeth to turn her diamond into stylus, as a parting shot to her jailers and the Queen they represent: “Whereupon the Lady Elizabeth at her departing out fr[om] Woodstocke wrote these Verses with her diamond in a glasse

166 Foxe, 1563. STC 11222, fol.1714. 167 A comparison between the 1570, 1576, and 1583 editions reveals that they all follow the revision to the 1563 edition witnessed in the 1570 edition. They all provide the same position of and narrative for Elizabeth’s Woodstock imprisonment. I here cite from the 1570 edition because of Foxe’s extensive involvement with its revision; See John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1570 edition) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), accessed May 11, 2014, http//www.johnfoxe.org, fol. 2334; See also John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1563 edition) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), accessed May 11, 2014, http//www.johnfoxe.org; John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1576 edition) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), accessed May 11, 2014, http//www.johnfoxe.org; and John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1583 edition) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), accessed May 11, 2014, http//www.johnfoxe.org. On Foxe’s involvement with the second revision, see “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Thomas S. Freeman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 60 window.” 168 Gone is the inversion from the 1563 edition, with its gesture (however unintentionally) toward co-production: “these verses she wrot w[ith] her diamond.” Here,

Foxe foregrounds the will and charisma of a subject who pointedly uses the point of a diamond. Denatured of any threat, the diamond is mastered by the sovereign subject rather than master of her. A tool, Elizabeth’s diamond disappears in the horizon of the

Reformation to come again.

It would seem then that within nine years of Acts and Monuments’s initial publication John Foxe has gotten Elizabeth’s diamond in line. An accessory to writing rather than a fashionable accessory, the diamond does valuable work. It offers no material distraction from Elizabeth’s message. Instead, it amplifies the Protestant princess’s correct orientation to worldly matter. The diamond becomes part of the machinery of

Protestant myth rather than an affective cog seducing the human. As Sara Ahmed points out with Heidegger’s example of the hammer, as long as an object does the work that we anticipate, the object itself fades into the background. 169 But it is precisely a disappearance in Foxe that renders Elizabeth’s diamond so present, so much a part of apprehension and desire. In the editions of 1570, 1576, and 1583, Foxe’s 1563 condemnation of the Catholic Mary’s delight in wearing gemstones and the Protestant

Elizabeth’s disinclination for doing so is excised. Any number of factors could account for the anecdote’s absence. Foxe conducted extensive revision and correction of the 1563 edition in advance of the printing of the 1576 Acts and Monuments . Thomas Freeman points out that substantial portions of the 1563 edition did not carry over into subsequent printings. He attributes this editing to the need to create room for new additions and to

168 Foxe, Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online , 1570, fol. 2334. 169 Ahmed, 47-48. 61 Foxe’s efforts to mitigate Catholic Nicholas Harpsfield’s harsh critique of the 1563 text.

Freeman writes, “Another [“obvious reason for these cuts”], resulting from the attacks by

Harpsfield and other Catholics on the first edition, was Foxe’s determination to airbrush any polemical blemishes, particularly of protestants holding schiasmatic or heretical beliefs, out of his history.” 170 Perhaps the requisites of print space directed Foxe’s decision to remove the comparison between Mary and Elizabeth’s orientation toward ornament. Perhaps he came to doubt the authenticity of “That which I haue sene and red” about the Tudor women’s affinity for and mistrust of jewels. Or perhaps Foxe found it difficult to allow the passage to stand in the face of Queen Elizabeth I’s determination to present herself decked in gemstones, like diamonds, under no one’s persuasion but her own.

Portraiture from the period shows Elizabeth gorgeously attired not only in the pearls so often associated with her but also in diamonds, frequently black either through a rare coloration of the stones or through the goldsmith’s technique of foiling. 171 For example, in the Phoenix portrait executed by Nicholas Hilliard around 1575, a substantial black diamond adorns the center of the upper bodice of Elizabeth’s gown, drawing the eye of the viewer. What appear to be smaller, black diamonds populate both the Queen’s collar and her headpiece. 172 Similarly, in Hilliard’s later Ermine portrait of Elizabeth

(1585), black diamonds again appear: they encrust the dark fabric of the gown, wink out

170 “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Thomas S. Freeman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 171 On foiling, please see Chapter 3. 172 Nicholas Hilliard, “Queen Elizabeth I” [The Phoenix Portrait], oil on panel, c. 1575, National Portrait Gallery London, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02074/Queen-Elizabeth- I?LinkID=mp01452&search=sas&sText=Queen+Elizabeth+I&OConly=true&role=sit&r No=4. 62 from a heavy necklace, and sit atop an extravagant headpiece.173 Moreover, as historian

Diana Scarisbrick notes, the famous “‘Three Brothers’” jewel, oriented around “a huge point-cut diamond,” dominates “the centre of the bodice,” and (one might add) the central focal point of the portrait as well. 174 Tawyna Cooper, curator of the National Portrait

Gallery in London, posits that due to the burgeoning portrait industry and the availability of reproductions, Queen Elizabeth would have been “the most familiar monarch of the

Tudors” to her subjects. 175 By extension, one might speculate that her fashionings, her gemstones, would also be objects known to the English people. Thus, negotiating an unadorned Protestant princess with an adorned Protestant queen 12 years into her reign might have presented Foxe with no meager obstacle.

The evangelical Foxe had spent the years of Queen Mary’s Counter Reformation amongst Protestant thinkers and printers in Germany. 176 For Foxe, Mary’s death and her half sister’s coronation enabled not only a return home but also the fulfillment of providential history. 177 In his dedicatory letter to Elizabeth, Foxe pronounces her the type

173 Nicholas Hilliard, “Queen Elizabeth I” [Ermine Portrait], [1585], Hatfield House in Diana Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery (London: Tate, 1995); For the attribution and dating of the portrait, see “The House/ Kings James Drawing Room,” “Hatfield House,” accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.hatfield- house.co.uk/content.asp?id=1&p=12&King-James-Drawing-Room. 174 Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , fig. 6, fig. 8. 175 Tawyna Cooper, “Encountering the Queen: Portraits of Elizabeth I,” 3 min., 24 sec, Elizabeth and Her People , October 10, 2013 – January 5, 2014, National Portrait Gallery London, accessed May 11, 2014, film http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/elizabethi/film.php. 176 “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Thomas S. Freeman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 177 “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Thomas S. Freeman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; In his entry on Foxe, Freeman describes Foxe’s final work, “a massive Latin commentary on Revelation.” Freeman attends to the resonance between Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and this text (published following Foxe’s death), citing the influence of John Bale’s treatment of Revelation. 63 of the Emperor Constantine, writing, “At length the Lord sent this mild Constantinus, to cease bloud, to staye persecution, to refreshe his people. In much like maner what bitter blastes, what smarting stormes haue been felt in England…till at last Gods pitifull grace sent vs your Maiestie….” 178 Part of the promise of Elizabeth’s reign lies in her Church’s reorientation toward the things of this world—a movement beyond a fallen materiality, and a reliance on biblical word that directs the believer to the Word that is God. What did a Protestant monarch covered in diamonds do to this promise?

A young woman and a diamond at the window: Foxe yearns for a monumental act of material erasure, diamond tracks turned Word. The plain princess vanishes. The imprisoned Elizabeth Tudor taking comfort in diamond poetry retreats. Lady Elizabeth emerges, using the diamond matter at her disposal as refutation, to showcase a “mind, shining and blazing more bright then pearle or stone, be it neuer so precious.” But Queen

Elizabeth with diamonds upon her body inevitably surfaces in Foxe’s text as well. She reminds that the impervious Protestant subject, Lady Elizabeth, probably slipped a diamond ring from her finger to craft the lines in the window. Upon Elizabeth’s immediate departure from Woodstock, as Foxe tells the story in 1570, would that diamond not have returned to its place upon her hand? To an extent, for Foxe, the

Woodstock diamond becomes the Žižekian petit objet a, a thing bearing the burden of a desire not to desire. The diamond thus serves as a manifestation of Foxe’s worry over material entanglement. However, there too is something intractable in the diamond’s mobility. The diamond elicits Foxe’s desire and refuses to be stilled by that desire.

Ultimately, the Woodstock diamond crystallizes Foxe’s inability to write the diamond

178 Foxe, 1563, STC 11222, sig. Biv. 64 according to his desires. Elizabeth might write with the stone, but Foxe cannot write about it in a way that ensures the straight line of history, what Madhavi Menon might term a heterohistory, that he wants. 179 Each iteration is haunted by the last in a way that sends the passage skittering. A glittering remenant, it ripples through the editions of Acts and Monuments , telling its own story of desirable permutations.

A Study in Diamond Desire V

A young man in the Tower, his father’s manuscript in his hand. On the verso of the seventh folio page a sonnet with the line “and graven with Diamondes in letters plain”

(l. 11). 180 Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger had been captured in February of 1554 as he led troops from the Kent uprising into London. The rebels sought to disrupt the proposed marriage of England’s Queen Mary I to Philip II of Spain, with the possibility of seeing the Protestant Elizabeth Tudor upon the English throne. 181 By March 15, 1554, Wyatt

179 Madhavi Menon, Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2008) 11, passim. 180 I here (and throughout) cite from Richard Harrier’s transcription of Wyatt’s poem “Who so list to hounte” from Egerton MS 2711. I do so because Egerton MS 2711 was Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder’s personal book. Many of the poems bear his handwriting or his marginal notations; See Thomas Wyatt, “Who so list to hounte,” The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry , ed. Richard Harrier (Cambridge: Harvard, 1975), 104-105; I also consulted the versions of the poem (as well as the attendant critical apparatus) printed by Ruth Hughey, Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, and R.A.Rebholz respectively; See Ruth Hughey, The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry , 2 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960); Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt , eds. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969); Thomas Wyatt, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems , ed. R.A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale University Press). 181 For more details concerning Thomas Wyatt the Yonger’s role in the uprising, see “Wyatt, Sir Thomas (b. in or before 1521, d. 1554),” Ian W. Archer in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30112 (accessed May 11, 2014). In his entry for 65 would be on trial, the same day that Mary’s councilors questioned Elizabeth Tudor. The following day, the princess entered the Tower as prisoner. 182 In less than a month, on

April 11, Wyatt would go to his death, proclaiming Elizabeth’s innocence in the moments before he could speak no more. 183 On May 19, Elizabeth and her diamond began the journey to Woodstock: “Much suspected by me, / Nothing proved can be….” On January

18, 1555, John Harington, who had been implicated “in Wyatt’s rebellion,” walked free from the Tower. 184 Perhaps in his possession was the manuscript of a son and father now gone, within it a precursor to Elizabeth’s diamond poetics. 185

The rebel’s father, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, had been a courtier and ambassador within the court of Henry VIII and a creature of Thomas Cromwell, one of the principal engineers of the Protestant Reformation in England. He was, of course, a poet too. He does not have the reputation of a poet who traffics in the material. In the poems contained in MS Egerton 2711, the manuscript in which the imprisoned son might have studied his father’s writing, the world of objects rarely seems to disturb the psychological landscape of an already troubled poetic self. As Stephen Greenblatt writes of Wyatt’s verse, “There is no more insistent expression of the ‘I’ in Tudor literature.” 186

Thomas Wyatt the Younger, Archer notes that after his arrest and trial Wyatt insisted that his interest had not been regicide but rather the protection of England from Spanish influence and interference. 182 Doran, 41. 183 See “Wyatt, Sir Thomas (b. in or before 1521, d. 1554),” Ian W. Archer in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 184 John Bayley, The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London , 2 vols. (London, 1825), 2: 448; See “Harington, John (c. 1517–1582),” Jason Scott-Warren in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, , http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12325 (accessed May 11, 2014). 185 This is Harrier’s speculation; See Harrier, 5 186 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980), 155. 66 Of course, scholars diverge in their characterization of this “I”: a manifestation of competing ideologies of power, a rhetorical construction rooted in ambassadorial discourse, an anxious masculinity subtended by the silenced female, a fashionable stance against court style, a liminal space of pleasurable self-abasement. 187 But regardless of the theoretical school, the “self-conscious” if not “self-disclosing” quality of Wyatt’s lyrics persists in attracting attention. 188 When objects do emerge in Wyatt’s poetic writings, critics translate them as symbols, material signifiers for some immaterial aspect belonging to the speaker or to the beloved.

However, a line in “Who so list to hounte,” one of Wyatt’s most canonical sonnets, gestures toward another way of reading. At the center, quite literally, of the line in question is an object, a diamond: “and graven with Diamondes in letters plain” (l. 11).

With this line, Wyatt does something that the hermeneutically inclined reader might find rather astonishing. In the midst of a sonnet crafted out of an extended metaphor, Wyatt asks us to not read past the object. Instead, he urges us to take him at his word, to call a diamond a diamond. And when we attend to the diamond, when we read with the stone, we discover not only a very different poem—a work that, at least in part, poses phenomenological, ontological, and theological questions—but also an early modern orientation toward diamonds at once similar and dissimilar from our own.

187 See Jeff Dolven, “Reading Wyatt for Style,” Modern Philology 105 (2007): 65-86; Daniel Juan Gil, “Before Intimacy: Modernity and Emotion in the Early Modern Discourse of Sexuality,” ELH (2002): 861-887; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning ; Jason Powell, “‘For Caesar’s I am’: Henrician Diplomacy and Representations of King and Country in Wyatt’s Poetry,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 415-31; and Jason Powell, “Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry in Embassy: Egerton 2711 and the Production of Literary Manuscripts Abroad,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004): 261-82. 188 Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: Turning the Word (New York: Oxford, 2012), 1. 67 In “Whoso list to hounte,” the poet imagines the lover as a hunter, the beloved as a deer, and rival suitors as competing gamesmen. The sonnet’s octet discovers the hunter/lover beaten in the chase, vacillating between acknowledged defeat and continued pursuit. In the sestet, he cautions his adversaries about the futility of tracking this

“hynde” (l.1)/woman. She is already marked as the quarry/beloved of another. The diamonds of the above line partake of a collar that ornaments the animal’s neck and pronounces her the possession of “Caesar” (l.13). The critical impulse has been to gloss

Wyatt’s “Diamondes” as “symbols of chastity.” 189 Editors of Wyatt suggest Petrarch (and presumably the critical apparatus attached to Petrarch’s poetry) as the authority for this interpretation. 190 Scholars cite the influence of Petrarch’s Rime sparse upon Wyatt, often terming the English writer’s verses “imitations” or “translations” of the works of the

Italian poet. 191 Despite some dissention, most agree that “Whoso list to hounte, “draws its source, at least in part, from Petrarch’s sonnet “Una candida cerva sopra l’erba.” 192 (I have included below both Wyatt’s sonnet and that of Petrarch in their entirety.)

Who so list to hounte I know where is an hynde Una candida cerva sopra l’erba but as for me helas I may no more verde m’apparve con duo corna d’oro,

189 See Wyatt, Muir and Thomson, M&T 267n11. 190 In his edition of Petrarch, Robert Durling suggests Petrarch’s “diamonds and topazes” as “emblems of steadfastness and chastity, respectively.” See Petrarch, “Una candida cerva sopra l’erba,” Rime Sparse , Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics , ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 336-37, esp. 336n. 191 See “Wyatt, Sir Thomas (c. 1503–1542),” Colin Burrow in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2011, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30111 (accessed May 11, 2014); See also Harrier, Hughey, Muir and Thomson, and Rebholz. 192 For the critical divergence on Wyatt’s source, see Wyatt, Muir and Thomson, 266,n VII. 68 the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore fra due riviere all’ombra d’un alloro,

I ame of theim that farthest cometh behind levando ‘l sole a la stagione acerba. yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde Era sua vista sì dolve superba drawe from the Diere but as she fleeth aforefaynting ch’ I’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro,

I folowe I leve of therfor come ‘’avaro che ‘n cercar Tesoro sethens in a net I seke to hold the wynde con diletto l’affanno disacerba.

Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte ‘Nessun mi tocchi,’ al bel collo d’intorno as well as I may spend his tyme in vain scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi. and graven with Diamondes in letters plain ‘Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.’

There is written her faier neck rounde abowte Et era ‘l sol già vòlto al mezzo giorno,

Noli me tangere for Cesars I ame Gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi,

And wylde for to hold though I seme tame 193 Quand’ io caddi ne l’acqua et ella sparve. 194

Undoubtedly, the ghost of Petrarch floats through the fourteen lines of Wyatt’s sonnet. Yet reliance upon readings of Petrarch, and potentially problematic readings at that, does not necessarily illuminate Wyatt’s project. 195 As Greenblatt famously points out in the opening to his chapter on Wyatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning , “There is no translation that is not at the same time an interpretation.” 196 And as commentators repeatedly note, Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hounte” “is very much his own” creation. 197 Even a cursory comparison between Petrarch’s “scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi” (l.10) and

193 As previously indicated, I cite from Harrier’s transcription of the poem throughout. Please note that I have been unable to render certain of Harrier’s typographical notations electronically. 194 Petrarch, “Una candida cerva sopra l’erba,” Rime Sparse , Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics , ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 336-37. 195 The role of symbolism and materialism in Petrarch’s own poetry merits further investigation, but it is beyond the bounds of this project. 196 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 115. 197 Hughey, 2.129-130n100. 69 Wyatt’s “and graven with Diamondes in letters plain” (l.11) 198 reveals differences.

Petrarch’s “scritto” becomes Wyatt’s “graven.” The Italian poet’s “topazi” or topazes drop out of the Englishman’s line. And Wyatt’s “in letters plain” does not appear in

Petrarch. 199

One could martial the perceived bankruptcy of the English language in the sixteenth century as the cause for these deviations from Wyatt’s Italian model.

Referencing an ambassadorial spat between Wyatt and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and citing Garrett Mattingly, Greenblatt writes, “There is, as both emperor and ambassador know, something outlandish about English: ‘Nobody in the sixteenth century,’ writes Mattingly, ‘except an Englishman was expected to speak English, not even the perfect ambassador.’” 200 Moving from the realm of diplomacy to poetry,

Elizabeth Heale hypothesizes that the limitations of English inhibited “the sonnet form” from gaining an initial following “among courtly poets”: “The very distinctiveness of

Petrarch’s tropes and topics may have made assimilation and adaptation of the form a challenge of huge proportions at a time when English was often felt to be short on vocabulary and cumbersome in syntax.” 201 Thus the absence of Petrarch’s “topazi” from

Wyatt’s line could be dismissed as a necessity of English rhyme: in English, the word

“topazes” just doesn’t offer the rhyming permutations of a word like “plain.” And

Wyatt’s annexation of “in letters plain” permits at least an approximation of a pentameter

198 I here made use of Durling’s English translation of Petrarch’s line as well. 199 As Holly Dugan pointed out to me, it would be interesting think through the implication of “plain” diamonds in the context of the Reformation and eventual Puritan insistence on plainness. 200 Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning , 145. 201 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (New York: Longman, 1998), 104. 70 line. Yet I posit that Wyatt’s subtractions and additions here exceed the demands of rhyme and meter placed on an English poet by the constraints of his native tongue. After all, George Puttenham pronounces Wyatt and Surrey “the first reformers of our English meetre and stile.” 202 I would argue that the glitter of “Diamondes” in “Whoso list to hounte” derives not (or not just) from formal requisite and figurative purchase but rather from the diamonds themselves as material objects, specifically as objects or implements of writing. To understand how to read Wyatt’s diamonds then we must first learn what it means to write with them.

In the wake of the fashion for nameplate necklaces ignited by the character of

Carrie Bradshaw in the television series Sex and the City , twenty-first century readers of

Wyatt’s sonnet might have little difficulty imaging one possibility for the design of the deer’s collar: diamonds linked together to spell out the injunction against touch and the declaration of wildness. Jewelry from the Tudor through the Jacobean period indicates the popularity of a single letter, monogram, or motto crafted out of precious metals and gemstones. 203 Interestingly, a portrait of Anne Boleyn (circa 1533-36)—the figure with whom critics most often associate Wyatt’s “hynde”—displays a prominent gold “B” hanging from the neck of Henry VIII’s second wife. 204 And in Hans Holbein the

202 Puttenham, 48-49. 203 Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , 53-4. 204 See “Anne Boleyn,” oil on panel, circa 1533-36, National Portrait Gallery London, accessed 5/11/14, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00142/Anne- Boleyn?LinkID=mp00109&search=sas&sText=anne+boleyn&role=sit&rNo=0; I first came across a similar portrait in Scarisbrick’s Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , but the portrait first listed here is a much lovelier and more flattering painting. In both cases, the National Portrait Gallery London lists the artist as unknown. For the portrait included by Scarisbrick, see “Anne Boleyn,” National Portrait Gallery, Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , fig. 41a and “Anne Boleyn,” oil on panel, late sixteenth century, National Portrait Gallery London, accessed May 11, 2014, 71 Younger’s painting of Henry VIII’s replacement for Anne Boleyn (1536/7), Jane

Seymour wears a “pendant jewel” in which diamonds of varying shapes form the letters

IHS , “the Greek name of Christ.” 205 Although the length of Wyatt’s inscription might seem to render the necklace of the sonnet an early modern poetic and fashionable fantasy, art historian Diana Scarisbrick records that “[l]onger inscriptions ornamented bracelets and neck jewels” in the period. As but one example, she offers “a chain of fifty diamond roman letters, between rubies flanked by twin pearls” that Queen Anne, wife of

England’s King James I, commissioned. 206

Of course, with a glance back to Petrarch, one could point out that Wyatt’s necklace thus styled might not be particular to the English poet, his country, or his historical moment. Petrarch’s “candida” (l.1) would seem to model a collar of similar make. Yet, aside from the difference in motto, which I will address below, what distinguishes the necklace of Wyatt’s “hynde” from that of Petrarch’s “candida” is the insistence of a relationship between its diamonds specifically and its writing: “and graven with Diamondes in letters plain / There is written her faier neck rounde abowte”

(emphasis mine, ll.11-12). This is a correspondence that Wyatt triply instantiates: In

Wyatt, Petrarch’s “scritto avea” (l.10) multiplies into “graven with,” “letters plain,” and

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00143/Anne- Boleyn?LinkID=mp00109&search=sas&sText=anne+boleyn&role=sit&rNo=1. 205 Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , fig. 3; For the painting, see Hans Holbein, “Jane Seymour,” Kunsthistoriches Museum, Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , fig. 2; see also Hans Holbein, “Jane Seymour,” on oak panel, circa 1536-37, Kunsthistoriches Museum, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.khm.at/en/learn/research/technologische-studien/band-12004/zu-maltechnik- und-restaurierung-des-portraets-der-jane-seymour-von-hans-holbein-d-j/. 206 Scarisbrick Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , 54 72 “is written” (ll. 11, 12). Wyatt thus very pointedly sets his diamonds amidst the activity of writing.

The meaning of “graven,” the past participle of grave , proves particularly key to understanding this resonance of the diamond in Wyatt’s sonnet. 207 In the sixteenth century, one of the denotations of the verb to grave was “To engrave”: “To engrave (an inscription, figures, etc.) upon a surface. Also, to engrave (a surface) with (letters, etc.)

Hence, to record by engraved or incised letters. arch. ” 208 The “ with ” of this definition would seem to describe setting ornamentation into “a surface.” According to this grammatical paradigm, Wyatt’s “graven with Diamondes” could suggest stones placed within a metallic framework in such a way as to create “letters plain.” However, the examples in the OED that accompany this signification of grave associate the word more with the carving of imagery (linguistic or figural) into a surface than with embedding.

This is evidenced by a line from Ralph Robinson’s translation of Thomas More’s Utopia :

“‘A piller of stone, with the deade mans titles therin graued.’”209 Here “titles,” presumably honorary appellations, are incised into a “stone” memorial. Dated to 1551,

Robinson’s translation and thus this deployment of grave postdates Wyatt’s death in 1542 by less than a decade. Other instantiations of grave from within roughly fifty years of

Wyatt’s birth (1503) and death offer a “smale tablys of ivory gravyn with ymages”

207 I was first drawn to this line and indeed to the poem itself by Nicola Shulman’s book on Wyatt; See Nicola Shulman, Graven With Diamonds: The May Loves of Thomas Wyatt (London: Short Books, 2011). 208 "grave, v.1". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/80995 (accessed November 20, 2013). 209 Ibid. 73 (1463) and “A fayre earthen pott gylded and grauen with letters.” 210 In each of the above phrases, that which is “graven” results from a cutting into, from the movement of one object along another. This reminds us of the linguistic plasticity of the word with and the resultant implications for Wyatt’s “graven with Diamondes” (emphasis mine, l.11). The preposition does follow “words of furnishing, filling, covering, adorning, and the like.”

But, when with chases after a past participle, it also introduces a degree of agency: “After a passive verb or participle, indicating the principal agent.” 211 To invoke a collar “graven with Diamondes” then is to entertain the possibility of the jewels serving not only as glittering embellishment but also as writing implements, enabling and sharing in the creation of “letters plain.”

The “with” that introduces Wyatt’s “Diamondes” resonates with Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick’s theorization of the preposition “beside.” In Touching, Feeling , Sedgwick writes, “ Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object.” 212 The passive voice construction of Wyatt’s graven with Diamondes” (l. 11) and “is written” (l. 12) indeed unsettles easy divisions between human subject and writing object. “Diamondes” are an object that a subject does work with but also an object that does work on the subject, recalling the double valence of “the

210 Ibid. 211 "with, prep., adv., and conj.". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/229612?rskey=0d0NqK&result=2&is Advanced=false (accessed November 21, 2013). 212 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 8. 74 vayne travail” in the third line. 213 Much like beside , with implies proximity. To write with a diamond is to have a diamond to hand . Words result from the touch of hand and stone.

For Maurice Merleau-Ponty this kind of touch between subject and object proves mutually constituting. He writes, “There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching….” 214 In place of “the solipsist illusion,” the fantasy of a Cartesian subject prior to the material world, Merleau-Ponty suggests a subject whose very existence emerges out of her contact with the objects brushing up against her.

From this touch ripple out “landscapes” that “interweave.” 215 Out of this overlapping terrain of subject and object arises what Merleau-Ponty terms “an intercorporeal being.” 216 Much like the materials of Sedgwick’s loom, a diamond at hand , in hand , would seem to promise a shared artistic endeavor, as well as the very creation of self:

“Where have they come from, the luscious materials that have been suddenly wooing, feeding my fingers with such solicitous immediacy? And how long has this been going on?” 217

But what if this kind of plastic tactility is denied, written out? Elizabeth Harvey grants the generosity of “the reciprocity of Merleau-Ponty’s touching hands.” Yet she

213 See the definition for “travail” as a verb in the period, "travail, v.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/205255?rskey=SdcfQC&result=4&is Advanced=false (accessed May 11, 2014). 214 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible , ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 143. 215 Merleau-Ponty, 143, 142 216 Merleau-Ponty, 143; Merleau-Ponty’s term here in some ways resonates with Bruno Latour’s concept of the subject-object ; See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 217 The above epigraph comes from the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s incomparably beautiful memoir; See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 199. 75 cautions against deploying “the synecdoche of the hand” as the totalization of touch in the early modern period. And like Iragaray, whose work she references, Harvey particularly worries over the hand’s colonizing impulse. She writes, “Yet the identification between the hand and touch is neither perfect nor symmetrical: the hand is an instrument of mastery, control, creativity, and gesture as well as tactility….” 218 In

“Whoso List,” the authorial hand of the king grasps the diamond to carve out not a poetics of possibility, but an injunction against touch: “Noli me tangere for Cesars I ame.” The diamond, a gem cut through with desire, participates in an inscription that denies desire. A vehicle of monarchical edict, the diamond in Wyatt’s poem would seem to leave no impression upon the king’s palm. Much like the hind, the gem exists as a possession for the monarch’s use and pleasure alone, touched but not touching. Bent only to “Cesars” will, the point of the diamond legislates against others’ desires—desires for the hind but also for the material touch of the stone. Thus, a sonnet that insists on the possibility of writing with diamonds, of an artistic coproduction between human and gem, simultaneously reserves the potential of that touch to one hand. With the hynd and diamond inscribed collar, Wyatt bodies forth an aesthetic coupling that elicits the desires of the poetic speaker, fellow hunters, and the reader alike. With a Tantalusian yearning, we stretch our fingers toward the glittering pair only to watch them recede behind a king’s edict—an edict in whose production they seem to partake.

218 Elizabeth Harvey, Introduction, Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1-21, esp. 10. Of interest is an essay in this collection on the trope of noli me tangere , although its interests are not those of this particular chapter; See Elizabeth Sauer and Lisa M. Smith, “ Noli me tangere : Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England,” Sensible Flesh , 141-58. 76 It is tempting to read Wyatt’s diamond denial as a prescient foretelling of what was to come. He might have written “Who so list” between 1526 and 1527, the time at which Wyatt’s probable dalliance with Anne Boleyn ended with Henry VIII’s burgeoning desire for her. 219 Ahead lay a decade of upheaval: the 1533 clandestine marriage between

Henry and Anne; the coronation, less than six months later, of a queen whose presence necessitated and facilitated the English Reformation; the commencement in 1534 of “the royal visitation[s]” by Thomas Cromwell’s “commissioners” that resulted in the confiscation of relics; the formalized dissolution of the monasteries that began in 1536, sending “gold and silver plate and jewels” to Henry’s treasury. 220 A material emptying of the religious landscape had begun, and the Crown, now head of both Church and State, would seem to be drawing all to it. Caesar’s diamond sentence in Wyatt’s sonnet would then prophesize what would be lost and the regulation of desire that would populate the absence. As both an ambassador of Henry and an agent of Cromwell, Wyatt’s subsequent participation in enacting these changes would gloss as the necessary material disavowal

219 Powell writes, “Traditionally, this poem has been linked to ‘Wyatt’s resignation of Anne Boleyn to ‘Caesar’ (Henry VIII) around 1526-27,” a connection that seems reasonable, even if it lacks definitive evidence” (428); See Powell, “Henrician Diplomacy”; On the dating and context of “Who so list,” see also Hughey, 2:130; Muir and Thomson, 267; Wyatt’s poems prove notoriously difficult to date. The dates of composition of the poems contained in the Egerton manuscript most likely range from the 1520s to the early 1540s, spanning the time of Wyatt’s service to Henry VIII. “Who so list to hounte” appears toward the beginning of Wyatt’s manuscript, but whether or not the poems in the Egerton exist in order of composition remains a point of contestation. Powell grants Joost Daalder’s positing of a “chronological order” as “a plausible argument” (428); See Powell, “Henrician Diplomacy”; On the order of composition, see also Rebholz, 12 and Muir and Thomson, xi-xii. 220 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400— c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 385-86; On monastic dissolution, see Guy, 145. 77 of Protestantism. His “diamonds plain” would cotton on to Foxe’s insistence on

Elizabeth’s Woodstock diamond as tool rather than ornament.

But this is to draw conclusions based upon a poetic body notoriously difficult to date. 221 It is to wrench from the sonnet disclosures that it seems unwilling to give. And it is to ignore the final line of yet another diamond couplet, this time expressed by hind and stone: “And wylde for to hold though I seme tame.” In this last line of Wyatt’s sonnet, a sounding emerges that belongs not to Caesar but to both the deer and her diamonds. The sole proprietorship of the king is undone through the stones’ writing of the hind’s voice.

In the assertion of wildness, we find a shared production of resistance. The appearance of tameness, of a kind of willing inertia, proves merely a false front for a wildness that promises movement. To grasp both diamond collar and deer is not to still the “wyld” desires that they generate in the huntsmen, in the poetic speaker, in the readers, even in the monarch. Possession, they assert, is never really possession. The hind and her diamonds will continue to go their own way, leading those that would follow them through the switchbacks of a forest of desires.

A Study in Diamond Desire VI

A woman and a diamond at the window. Through the glass, a hind and writing diamonds emerge from the forest. They fle from me / that sometime did me seke .222

Woman, deer, diamonds disappear. But their writing keeps drawing us back, sends us wandering through the ruins.

221 See Powell, Muir and Thomson, Rebholz (cited on previous page) on this point. 222 Thomas Wyatt, “They fle from me that sometime did me seke,” Harrier, 131. 78 Chapter Two: Traveling in Early Modern Diamond Myth and Narrative

In February 1583, Queen Elizabeth I penned in ink rather than in diamond a letter to the Indian Mughal Emperor Akbar, requesting “mutual and friendly trafique of marchandize” between his empire and England. She further asked that “the bearer of this letter John Newbery, jointly with those that be in his company” be “favourably” received. 223 Newbery and his men were all part of the recently formed Turkey Company

(reissued as the Levant company in 1592), whose letters patent Elizabeth had granted on

September 1 of that year. Part of the “marchandize” in which the Turkey Company and the English Crown behind it hoped to “trafique” was diamonds. Until 1727 when diamonds were found in eastern Brazil, India (primarily the country’s Deccan Plateau) existed as the sole global source for the stone. 224 In 1583, England had no mercantile presence in India proper and had only recently encroached into the Levantine trade circuit. In the late 1570s, Sir Francis Drake had completed his global tour, capped by a purported “verbal agreement with the king of Ternate” for the establishment of English

“factories” on the island in the East Indies. 225 Shankar Raman suggests Drake’s

Moluccan intervention as the foundational moment “for the development of the English colonial enterprise,” writing “He [Drake] had transformed the imaginary and distant East

223 Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations , Hakluyt Society, 12 vols. (Glasglow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903-1905), 5:451; Elizabeth also pens an additional letter to an unnamed “King of China” (5:451). 224 See Bruce Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade and the Growth of Geographical Knowledge from Columbus to James I,” Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice , ed. Jean Brink and William Gentrup (Brookfield, VT: Scholar Press, 1993), 86-99, esp. 88; Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty, 317. 225 Shankar Raman, Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture , (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 157. 79 into one that could be experienced, touched, and perhaps even possessed.” 226 Yet not until the early years of the seventeenth century would England operate what Michael

Neill terms “successful trading factories” in the East Indies. 227 And the promise of the islands was principally the spices of their moniker, not diamonds. 228

Thus, the limited diamonds making their way into the western island arrived through continental trade powers, first Venice and then Portugal. As historian Bruce

Lenman describes, Venice had long been ascendant in the dissemination of Indian diamonds. 229 However, the Portuguese, with their plantations on the Indian coast, eventually surpassed Venice as the western dealer in the eastern stones. Lenman writes,

“Because Golconda [the ancient Indian kingdom known for diamonds] was adjacent to

Bijapur, Goa and, therefore, Lisbon, became diamond markets rivaling or surpassing

Venice in the course of the sixteenth century.” 230 England would not gain anything resembling a foothold in the Indian diamond trade until the creation of the English East

India Company (EEIC) in 1600. And while Lenman attributes the establishment of

London as “a major centre of the international gem trade” to the founding of the EEIC and to the British unification under James I, he also demonstrates the unevenness of

226 Raman, 157 227 Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 315. 228 Others gemstones did turn out to be available there. 229 Bruce P. Lenman, “The East India Company and the Trade in Non-Metallic Precious Materials from Sir Thomas Roe to Diamond Pitt,” The Worlds of the East India Company , ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester: Boydell, 2002): 97-109, esp.100. 230 Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade,” 93. 80 England’s diamond acquisition and the challenges of regulation that it faced throughout the seventeenth century. 231

Clearly, Indian diamonds had some kind of presence in England during the sixteenth century, as evinced by the writing diamonds discussed in Chapter One. Yet the challenge of sourcing larger stones would have translated, except in a few instances, into smaller diamonds set amongst extensive gold and enamel work, as jewelry historian

Diana Scarisbrick has convincingly demonstrated. 232 And it would seem that these diamonds circulated mostly within the jeweled echelons of the court. Thus, at the time of

Elizabeth’s letter to Akbar (who, one might add, did not at this time control the diamond resources of central, southern India), much of England’s diamond dealings traded in myth about the stones and the people and the place from which they came. This myth both preceded English travel into India and persisted as an ideological apparatus by which writers (of fictitious and non-fictitious genres) sought to manage encounter.

This chapter will think through two interrelated myths about the western experience of eastern commodities generally and Indian diamonds specifically. If Chapter

One investigated the writing done with diamonds, then this chapter, in part, attends to the writing done about diamonds. I begin with one of the stories that medieval and early modern, western travel literature told about India, the East, and the diamond. Travelers, like Christopher Columbus, encountering India (or what they presumed to be India) often describe the country as an edenic space of plenitude whose bounty requires no labor—a bower of material availability to the westerner that it welcomes. To a certain extent, this

231 Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade,” 95. 232 Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection (New York: Abrams, 1993),76. 81 image becomes a stock representation of English Renaissance drama’s imagination of

India and the surrounding geography, as I will discuss in both this and the following chapter. The diamond maps particularly pronouncedly into this desirable landscape of surfeit and ease. Indeed, so powerful is this myth of the laborless diamond that it continues to inform modern accounts of the early days of diamond discovery.

The second myth to which this chapter attends develops out of the first: the

English merchant can readily source eastern luxuries, like the Indian diamond, from this warehouse of wonders and render them English commodities. In a section on the Richard

Hakluyts (both attorney and compiler respectively) and Ralph Fitch, one of the Levant agents in Newbery’s party, I examine the notion that these eastern commodities turned

English provided a means to solidify both nationhood and eventually international reputation. Once commodified, these eastern luxuries would point back to England, posing no risk of affecting the merchant who sought to obtain them or the fashionista who would wear them. Indeed, this myth has been maintained by literary scholars, even as they seek to challenge the fallacy of England as an always already empire. While

Daniel Vitkus dismantles the myth of early modern England as an imperial force, pointing to the island’s inability to enact the kind “of colonizing effort” achieved by continental powers, he suggests eastern commodities as a means toward global position:

“Instead, the alternative path to power was through the acquisition of valuable commodities: gold, silver, and pearls taken from newly ‘discovered’ lands, luxury goods obtained through trade in Asia or the Mediterranean….” 233

233 Vitkus, Turning Turk 21. 82 As the above myths indicate, in many early modern English texts the Indian diamond has a way of becoming an object marked not just as Indian but as “eastern” or

“oriental.” The cause for this is two-fold—the first specific to the concept of “India” in the period, the second to the early modern diamond. As already stated, throughout the early modern period, what we identify as modern India provided diamonds for the global world market. Yet Jonathan Gil Harris has described the way in which “India” in the western (specifically English), early modern imagination existed as a diffuse word, encompassing the modern subcontinent, huge swaths of Asia, Ethiopia, and even parts of the Americas. 234 For westerners, India seemed to stretch across the East, and eventually the West too. 235 This misbegotten mapping resulted from a variety of factors: the challenges of early modern travel and the dissemination of resultant information, the misidentification of terrains and peoples, the power of western fantasy and its dreamings of supremacy. Early modern India was thus everywhere and nowhere. Drawing upon the work of Shankar Raman, Harris writes, “…‘India’ described for Europeans a generalized

‘final frontier’ of the exotic and unknoweable.” 236 Within this ‘final frontier,’ one of the most “exotic” and “unknoweable” objects was the diamond.

Harris rightly emphasizes the effect of the incorporation of the New World, through the travels of Columbus, into the dislocations of early modern “India.” However,

I here attend largely to the eastern resonance of “India” and the diamond. While some travelers to the Americas, like Sir Walter Ralegh in his trip to Guiana, whisper the

234 Jonathan Gil Harris, introduction, Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England , ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1-20, esp. 1-2. 235 Harris stresses that this was, of course, not true for the inhabitants within the specific countries grouped under the western heading of “India”; See Harris, Indography , 1 236 Harris, Indography , 2 83 possibility of New World diamonds, the early modern experience of the diamond, was primarily framed as a thing of eastern provenance. 237 In early modern texts, the diamond has a way of emerging in eastern spaces other than present-day India. This in part derives from historical reality. Smithsonian curator George Harlow writes, “It would be an oversight not to mention something of the great diamond treasures amassed by the

Moguls, the Persians, and the Ottoman Turks. The land routes between Europe and India passed through Persia and the Middle East.” 238 Both trade and conquest would have led to the circulation of diamonds between the spaces of India, the Ottoman Empire, and

Persia. Thus, Europeans traveling into eastern spaces other than what we identify as modern India, like the territories of the Ottoman and Persian empires, most likely would have encountered diamonds there. But the English association of diamonds not just with

India but also with the East more generally enables too a discourse about the differences of eastern and western handling of materiality. Harris argues that the “writing” of and about India was also, perhaps primarily, the scripting of “the European self” by way of the Saidian “photonegative logic of identity and difference.” 239 This kind of narrative practice would have been contingent not only upon eastern people, real or imaged, but also upon eastern objects. And very often through diamonds, English writers and travellers attempt to scratch a line of demarcation.

However, Harris and others have noted the potential of eastern bodies to disrupt efforts to write an English identity into existence by way of an imagined India and the

237 Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of Guiana , ed. Benjamin Scmidt (Boston: Bedford, 2008), 91-92. 238 George E. Harlow, “Following the History of Diamonds,” The Nature of Diamonds , 116-41, esp. 134. 239 Harris, Indography , 3 84 East. In early modern texts, Harris writes, “one might hear voices that resist or complicate English hegemony.” 240 As it turns out, one of the “voices” that we hear is that of the diamond, and it tells a narrative quite distinct from those of English travelers and merchants, historians and playwrights, and modern journalists and scholars. As diamond myth unfolds within and across the medieval and early modern texts examined here, we discover not a western (and specifically English) identity created and reified by the

Indian diamond, but rather subjects disoriented and changed by it. The Indian diamond does not reflect a stable English self but instead refracts its fragmented nature. Moreover, the diamond points to a relationship between Indians and gem quite removed from

English projections of fetishism. Far from ornamenting western fantasy of India and the

East as a land of easy plenitude, the diamond insists upon the labor of the human bodies that bring it to the surface and put it into circulation. Myth yields to the travel narrative of the diamond—a story of brutality and potentiality that asks us to reconsider our own fairytales that we tell about the stone.

The Mythic Promise of Laborless Diamonds

In John Fletcher’s Island Princess (c.1620), the Portuguese hero Armusia marvels at the bounty that he and his compatriots have discovered “among the blessed Islands”:

Where every wind that rises blowes perfumes,

And every breath of aire is like an Incence:

The treasure of the Sun dwels here, each tree

As if it envied the old Paradice,

240 Harris, Indography , 3 85 Strives to bring forth immortall fruit; the spices

Renewing nature, though not deifying,

And when that fals by time, scorning the earth,

The sullen earth, should taint or sucke their beauties,

But as we dreamt, for ever so preserve us:

Nothing we see, but breeds an admiration;

The very rivers as we floate along,

Throw up their pearles, and curle their heads to court us;

The bowels of the earth swell with the births

Of thousand unknown gems, and thousand riches. 241

“[T]he blessed Islands” for which Armusia offers this panegyric are the spice islands of the East Indies, specifically the isles of Tidore and Ternate in which the primary action of the play takes places. However, following the play’s cast of characters and prior to the opening line, we are given the direction “The Scene India,” indicating the kind of geographical and terminological slide that Harris identifies within the early modern conception of India. Fletcher’s characters and his audience for the duration of the play voyage in the East Indies, India, the East—perhaps, above all, in a dreamscape of material abundance not only awaiting the westerner but also readily abandoning itself to him. 242 All one need do is inhale to catch the intoxicating fragrance that wafts on the

241 John Fletcher, “The Island Princes,” The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon , ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1.3.16-30. Many thanks to Gil Harris for reminding me about this passage from The Island Princess . On early modern conceptions of India as paradise, see Harris, Introduction, Indography . 242 On the ways in which The Island Princess might have resonated with contemporary English politics, see Neill and Raman. 86 breeze. The waters buoy the Portuguese, dropping pearls in their laps as supplication. The earth under their feet encloses glittering stones merely awaiting presentation. One senses that the only labor involved in divulging these “thousand riches” will belong to “the earth” as (presumably) she brings them forth, in an easy delivery of great expectations. 243

India here emerges as a space of opulence and ready plenty. A second Eden, this land of surfeit abundance necessitates not Milton’s “irksome toil” (9.242) for its yield. 244

No one distills essence into perfume. No one processes plant matter into spices. No one dives for pearls. No one mines mineral deposits. Although Armusia goes on to address the “brave” and “civill” nature of the island people, they are curiously absent from the material landscape. Rather, pieced of rippling silks, intoxicating spices, and winking jewels, India holds out material wonders for the taking, not to its inhabitants but to the

Europeans for whom it has forever been waiting.

Armusia’s India emerges in the imaginative realm of the theater and not in the travel accounts of the wide world beyond its doors. But the India of The Island Princess partakes in an orientalist fantasy of the country that appears in early modern travel documentation as well. On March 4, 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote to Spain’s King

Ferdinand and Queen Isabela with the details and delights of his initial voyage to what he

243 I am sensitive to an invested in ecoecritical approaches. Thus, I do not mean to elide the labor that nature is clearly made to do in Armusia’s description. Indeed, thinking about the cost that the land bears in diamond excavation would be productive way to extend this project. It does seem, though, that Armusia here treats the earth’s gifts as the minimal efforts of an easy and graceful style (even, amazingly, pregnancy). 244 John Milton, Paradise Lost , ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005); Gil Harris makes explicit the correspondence between (western) early modern conceptions of India as paradise and (western) early modern hopes of retaking that paradise and its commodities: “The hope of reclaiming Paradise was also repeatedly interarticulated with mercantile dreams of future wealth” (7); Harris also alludes to the “Milton’s spicy Paradise” as “oriental; See Harris, Introduction, Indography , 7. 87 believed to be the East, the land(s) known as India. That Columbus consequently proved entirely wrong about the geographical coordinates of his landing—the West rather than the East Indies provided the terrain to which he staked claim—does not revise India as the initial horizon of Columbus’s desire. 245 The daydream of India thus shaped

Columbus’s experience. As J.M. Cohen writes of Columbus, “His goal was the rich lands described by Marco Polo and the romantic Sir John Mandeville, lands flowing with gold and spices and eager to be awakened to the true faith.” 246

In his celebratory letter, such are the “lands” that he describes for the Spanish monarchy. Of the island that he terms Española, Columbus writes, “This island is in a place, as I have said, signaled by the hand of Our Lord, where I hope His Majesty will give Your Highness as much gold as you need, spicery of a certain pepper [to fill] as many ships as Your Highness may order to be loaded, and as much mastic as you may order to load…And as much lignum aloe as you may order to be loaded, and as much cotton as you may order to be loaded….” 247 The promise of Columbus’s India lies in the ceaseless permutations of material replenishment. Piles of gold, mounds of pepper, bales of cotton without end. And this provision upon demand would seem to require no more of the Spanish subjects or their proxies than the loading of the ships headed back West.

Indeed, Columbus’s repetition of the passive “order to be loaded” would seem to disembody the labor of hauling cargo, giving it an aura of magical wish fulfillment.

245 On Columbus’s disorientation, see Harris, Indography , 5 and Ed. and trans J.M. Cohen, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus , introduction (New York: Penguin, 1969): 11-24. 246 Cohen, The Four Voyages , 13 247 Christopher Columbus, “Letter to the Sovreigns of 4 March 1493 Announcing the Discovery,” qtd. in Margarita Zamor, “Christopher Columbus’s ‘Letter to the Sovereigns’: Announcing the Discovery,” New World Encounters , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-11, esp. 3. 88 Columbus concludes the above passage of portended commodities with the assurance of

“so many slaves that they are innumerable.” Thus, the labor so entirely absent from

Armusia’s Indies makes, at the very least, a showing in Columbus’s epistle. But

Columbus, however horribly, treats these people, who “will come from the idolaters,” as yet one more commodity that India provides for the Spanish good, placing them in the loading list between “cotton” and the possibility of “rhubarb and cinnamon.” He does not connect them with a labor force facilitating mining or harvesting: India simply does not require it.

Intriguingly, the travel narratives for which Columbus supposedly had an affinity,

The Travels of John Mandeville and The Travels of Marco Polo , participate in and generate myth similarly unconstrained by labor. However, they do so specifically around accounts of Indian diamonds. John Larner underscores both the popularity of these works respectively and the temporal proximity of their production: “The two most famous

European books about Asia, those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, were written within sixty to seventy years of each other, between 1298 and, at the latest, 1365, which is to say toward the beginning and end of the first direct engagement of Europe with the further East.” 248 Scholars suggest that of the two books Mandeville’s proved the more popular, particularly in England. Iain Macleod Higgins posits that the extant manuscripts of Mandeville (“some three hundred…in more than ten languages”) far exceed those of

Polo. 249 In her careful archival excavation of both Mandeville and Polo’s respective texts,

248 John Larner, “Plucking Hairs from the Great Cham’s Beard: Marco Polo, Jan de Langhe, and Sir John Mandeville,” Marco Polo and the Encouter of East and West , eds. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 133-155, ed. 133. 249 Mandeville, Higgins, introduction, xii-xiii. 89 Suzanner Yeager attends to the particularity of English readers’ affinity for Mandeville.

She writes, “Because of the special relationship between Mandeville and the Middle

English vernacular language, along with the more limited pattern of the Devisement’s

[Polo’s Travels ] transmission into England, the reception of both the Devisement and

Mandeville by English audiences deserves further assessment regarding what factors distinguished these books, making one a ‘best-seller’ in England and the other, not.” 250

Nevertheless, as Yeager notes, English readers fluent in Latin might have read Francesco

Pipino’s translation of Polo’s text. And both Yeager and George Parks identify the availability of an English translation of Polo’s Travels by 1579, a little less than a century after Mandeville appeared in English in 1496. 251

Scholars like to point to the distinctions between the travels of Polo and

Mandeville—the credibility of the former and the incredibility of the later. 252 I do not intend here to wade into the debate over the truthfulness or fabulousness of Mandeville, over whether medieval and early modern readers took the text as fact or fiction. As I have said to my students, I do not find this stark dichotomy a particularly useful way for engaging with Mandeville and the moment in which he wrote (or did not write, for that matter). That Mandeville’s book, with its descriptions of the East and its materials, maintained such a long run of popularity does, though, indicate the resonance that it had with early modern readers. Even though Larner dismisses Mandeville’s text among

250 Suzanne M. Yeager, “The World Translated: Marco Polo’s Le Divesement dou monde, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and their Medieval Audiances,” Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West , 156-181, esp. 158. 251 See George Parks, “Tudor Travel Literatyre: A Brief History,” Hakluyt Handbook , ed. D.B. Quinn (Farnham: Ashgate, 1974), 97-132, esp. 98 and Yeager, 158-59. 252 Yeager actually thinks that their distinct content has something to do with divergent popularity in England; See Yeager, 157-58. 90 “learned circles” as fabula, he concedes the hold the work had on the early modern

English “imagination”: “Above all, in the England of Shakespeare, the East was

Mandeville’s East.” 253 As late as 1589, a Latinized version of Mandeville’s Travels appeared in print among other voyage accounts in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal

Navigations (to which I will turn below)— “the longest entry” in Hakluyt’s massive work, as Peter Mancall observes. 254 And, as archival research has demonstrated, one of the passages in Mandeville’s lengthy and beloved book that continually drew readers’ attention was the knight’s description of Indian diamonds. Rosemary Tzanaki writes,

“But perhaps the most interesting of all types of natural wealth in the Book are the diamonds; these are remarked upon in manuscripts of most versions and times, and the marginal notes refer both to they way diamonds grow and to their virtues.” 255

In an extended passage on Indian diamonds, Mandeville acknowledges a relationship between the discovery of diamonds and the rock worked over by gold miners. He recounts, “Very hard diamonds are often found in the mass that comes out where gold is refined from the mine, when this mass is broken into small pieces; and it sometimes happens that one is found as big as a pea, and sometimes smaller….” 256

However, the labor that Mandeville here admits belongs not to the diamond but to the

253 Larner, “Plucking,” 147. 254 See Larner, “Plucking,” 147 and Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 187. Both Larner and Mancall emphazie that Hakluyt himself saw Mandeville as little more than fiction. For Larner and Mancall, Hakluyt’s inclusion of a Latin Mandeville with a subsequent Latin “Admonition to the Reader”(Larner 146) indicates that for the compiler Hakluyt proved generically distinct from the true travel narratives to follow. Larner and Mancall respectively go on to theorize Hakluyt’s reasons for printing Mandeville. 255 Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 124. 256 Mandeville, Higgins, 99 91 gold, with the diamond as but a happy byproduct of the effort for the latter commodity.

Moreover, Mandeville indicates that the diamonds achieved through this tangential connection to working human bodies are not those of India, stones that he deems “the best and the most precious.” 257 He continues the above sentence, “…and they are to some extent as hard as those of India, and cut steel and glass easily.” 258 The comparative phrase

“as hard as” posits that the above diamonds are not Indian but rather belong to a different geography, perhaps to Macedonia—a locale that Mandeville connects to diamonds in the previous sentence.

To Indian diamonds Mandeville grants the most attention in his digressive disquisition on the gem. And Indian diamonds, according to Mandeville, encounter the human through quite different means: they grow, rather like plants, out of the country’s rock. Some indeed emerge apparently on the face of “mountains” near to the places in which “gold mines” have been established, as well as on the less accessible “adamant rocks in the sea.” 259 Mandeville writes, “…they grow several together, one small, the other large….” 260 Others, some of the most desirable, germinate out of the “freezing water that becomes crystal” in “the north” of India. 261 According to Mandeville, “On these crystal rocks grow the good diamonds that seem to be the color of opaque yellow crystal resembling the color of oil, and they are so hard that no one can polish them, and these diamonds are called Hamese in this country.”262 With ease, these diamonds can be cultivated indoors, an experiment with which Mandeville proclaims familiarity: “I have

257 Ibid. 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid. 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid 98. 92 many times demonstrated that if they are kept with a little of the rock, and not separated from their root, and wet often with May dew, they grow visibly every year, and the small ones become quite big.” 263 The impression that one receives of diamonds, particularly

Indian diamonds, in Mandeville’s Travels is that they can be culled with minimal effort right from the earth’s surface, like a daffodil bulb. The passive voice that I here invoke proves intentional, for nowhere does Mandeville mention who gathers these seedlings of stone.

Bountiful diamonds and India was an association that Marco Polo’s Travels had earlier made, with its detailing of the diamond caches of Montupalli, an Indian kingdom seemingly located in the Deccan plateau. Polo’s Indian diamonds do not share in the generative properties that Mandeville ascribes to the gems. They do not sprout from crystals or take root in mountain rocks. But, like Mandeville’s diamonds, those of Marco

Polo’s narrative, litter portions of the Indian landscape. They “are got” rather than worked for and over. 264 And they do depend upon water, albeit in a different way. Marco

Polo writes:

You must know that in the kingdom there are many mountains in which

the diamonds are found, as you will hear. When it rains the water rushes

down through these mountains, scouring its way through mighty gorges

and caverns. When the rain has stopped and the water drained away, then

men go in search of diamonds through these gorges from which the water

has come, and they find plenty. 265

263 Ibid 99. 264 Marco Polo, The Travels , ed. and trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1958), 272 265 Ibid. 93 Before departing, the journeying water delivers diamonds, crystalized manna from heaven awaiting discovery.

Marco Polo goes on to provide a codicil to this narrative of easy diamond fluidity, to which I will return. However, modern histories recounting the early days of diamonds in both India and much later in South Africa cotton on to the pre- and early modern historiographies’ correlation between alluvial diamond sources and effortless acquisition of the stones. In detailing the burgeoning of De Beers, Victoria Finlay writes, “The history of how one company cornered the market in diamonds…begins in South Africa in

1866, with a brownish stone scooped out of the Orange River by a boy named Erasmus

Jacobs.” 266 A sparking river rock, the diamond beckons and is “scooped” up in one gentle motion. I am not suggesting that Erasmus Jacobs did not fish “a brownish” diamond “out of the Orange River” in the manner that Finaly describes. Certainly, some diamonds have been found winking out of the water. As geologist Alfred Levinson explains, the effect of weather upon the surfaced kimberlite and lamproite pipes carrying diamonds results in a dispersal of the gems into different types of “secondary deposits,” including those centered in rivers. 267 Indeed, as Levinson notes, many of the secondary diamond sources in India were alluvial. 268 But this does not mean that all of these diamonds rested within easy reach on the sandy bottom of a river or stream. An examination of the historical reality of early modern, Indian diamonds reveals that labor was required, has always been required, to put humans in touch with diamonds.

266 Finlay, 338-39. 267 Alfred A. Levinson, “Diamond Sources and Their Discovery,” The Nature of Diamonds ,71-103 esp. 72-73. 268 Levinson, Nature of Diamonds , 72-73. 94 In 1626, Samuel Purchas published William Methwold’s Relations of Golconda as part of a "supplementary volume" of "the fourth enlarged edition of his [Purchas’s]

Pilgrimage.”269 An English East India Company (EEIC) factor, Methwold spent a lifetime in service to the trading company both at home in England and abroad in

Southeast Asia. The Relations spans the period from 1618 to 1622, during which time

Methwold, then the EEIC’s primary factor for the Indian Coromandel Coast, travelled with two companions to view an Indian diamond mine. 270 In his edition of Methwold’s

Relations , George Moreland identifies the location of Methwold’s diamond sightseeing with the “diamond-field” of Kollur along the Krishna River on the eastern edge of the

Deccan Plateau, noting that this is the same mine so canvassed by the famous, French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier.271 What becomes clear from reading both the

Englishman and the Frenchman’s respective accounts of the Kollur diamond establishment is that so-called alluvial Indian diamond sources necessitated extreme labor for extraction.

Methwold begins the account of his journey to Kollur with a piece of diamond origin story not dissimilar to that recounted by Finlay. Of “Diamonds lately discouered in this Kingdome,” Methwold writes, “A silly Goat-herd keeping his flock amongst those

269 William Methold, “Relations of the Kingdome of Golchonda….,” Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. W.H. Moreland, vol. 66. 2 nd Ser., introduction (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), xxv. 270 Methwold, Relations of Golconda , Moreland, introduction, xxix; See also “Methwold , William (bap. 1590, d. 1653),” Michael Strachan in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18627 (accessed May 13, 2014); Both Strachan and Moreland (introduction, xxx) note that Methwold was made to return to London to answer to charges of both private trading and a botched diamond purchase. 271 Methwold, Relations of Golconda , Moreland, note 2, 30 95 mountaines, stumbled (by chance) vpon a stone that shined somewhat bright, which he carelesly tooke vp….” 272 Methwold unrepentantly frames this account with a certain amount of classist disdain for the less than wordly shepherd. Attracted by the diamond’s shine, the “silly Goat-herd” simply picks up the stone, as one might a quarter found on the sidewalk. According to Methwold, the diamond found by the shepherd passes hand to hand “until it came to those owners which knew the worth….” 273 Thus, in its opening,

Methwold’s tale of the Indian diamond promises the laborless legend told by Mandeville and Marco Polo and repeated by modern historians and journalists.

However, myth in Methwold soon gives way to what he witnesses at Kollur. The alluvial diamonds of Kollur were situated near to but not apparently directly in the

Krishna River. “[T]hose owners which knew the worth” of the discovered diamond

“found in the bowels of the earth a plentifull myne,” a “myne” that required bodies to move its cache to the surface. At the Kollur mine, Methwold saw the following:

“…by their owne reports, there worke not daily fewer then 30000. soules, some

digging, some filing baskets, some lauing out water with buckets, others carrying

the earth vnto a certaine square leuell place, whereupon they spread it foure or

fiue inches in thicknesse, which being dried by that dayes Sunne, some of them

the next day with great stones in their hands, bruise the clods of earth, and

272 William Methold, “Relations of the Kingdome of Golconda,” in Samvel Pvrchas, Pvrchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1626), Huntington STC 20508.5, 1002; I follow the spelling of Methwold generally now adopted (see note 241). On the title page for Methwold’s “Relations,” Methwold’s name appears without the “w.” 273 Methold, Pvrchas 1002. 96 gathering from thence the pebble stones, throw them, by and sifting the rest, they

find the Diamonds amongst the dust….” 274

Thousands of human hands tunnel down into the earth and lug forth buckets of wet dirt.

Human hands pour that clay and sand into drying areas that other human hands have formed. And human hands strike at the dried mass and sort through the “dust” in the name of the diamond. Moreover, the areas of designated digging are not holes of a minimal depth, akin to those shoveled in the sand during a day at the beach. Instead,

Methwold describes them as unreinforced “pits.” To remove the pails of diamond dirt from these “square large pits” requires a ladder of human bodies: “…in place of pullies, and such like deuices, they with many people setting one aboue another, hand vp from one to another vntill it comes to the place it must rest in….” 275 As Methwold notes, by the following day, water reclaims this hard-won terrain: “…the place where ouer night they wrought dry, is next morning a fathome [six feet] deepe vnder water.” 276

According to Methwold, a shantytown has spread out across the inhospitable land on which the Kollur mine sits. He terms it “…a place naturally so barren, that before this

Discouery it was hardly inhabited….” 277 In poorly constructed homes, live “a hundred thousand Soules consisting of Myners, Merchants, and such others as liue by following such concourses….” They subsist on imported provisions purchased at an exorbitant rate. 278 There is little of the fantasy of ease in the world of Indian diamonds that

Methwold visits.

274 Methold, Pvchas, 1002. 275 Methold, Pvrchas 1003. 276 Methold, Pvrchas 1003. 277 Methold, Pvrchas 1003. 278 Methold, Pvrchas 1003 97 Writing roughly fifty years later, Tavernier offers a similar account of the Kollur mine, merely ornamented with the greater detail of one who knew the diamond trade intimately and spent considerable time in the kingdom of Golconda. 279 The system of diamond retrieval and “sifting” described in Methwold reappears with a slightly more developed process for the latter activity. To the “pits” depicted in Methwold, Tavernier gives an estimate of “depth,” measured at “ten, twelve, or fourteen feet.” 280 In place of

Methwold’s “30000.soules,” Tavernier reports “60,000,” counting children among them.

He writes, “The first time I was at this mine there were close upon 60,000 persons who worked there, including men, women, and children, who are employed in diverse ways, the men digging, the women and children in carrying earth…” (75). The children that

Tavernier reintroduces into early modern diamond mining initiates an uncomfortable trajectory into the future: the modern diamond industry has found Indian children’s hands apt for the work of cutting, regardless of the dangers involved and regulatory efforts. 281

Technically, the diamonds mined from Kollur belonged to the Golconda Sultan.

However, the Sultan found it expedient to lease out parcels of diamond rich territory while ensuring that he received diamonds in excess of ten carats through the oversight of his own governor. 282 Methwold quotes the price for the Kollur lease at “three hundred thousand Pagodes a yeere” and notes that a member “of the Cast of the Goldsmiths” paid

279 Tavernier is one of the early modern, western merchants with whom we most associate diamonds. As V. Ball documents in his introduction to Tavernier’s travels, Tavernier was an established trader by the late 1630s (xiii). The Frenchman made numerous trips into the East, most notably to India but to Persia as well. It would seem that by the early 164os, Tavernier had begun investigation into establishing diamond and gem trade in India (xiv). See Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India , ed. and trans. V. Ball, vol. 1, introduction (London: Macmillan, 1889): xi-xxxvii. 280 Tavernier, 77. 281 van der Gaag, 39. 282 Methold, Pvrchas, 1003. 98 this price of privilege. 283 The mine of Raolcondo in the neighboring kingdom of Bijapur

(the province of the Adil Shahi Sultan, as Khalidi notes) deployed a system of land grants akin to that of Kollur. 284 Merchants paid the monarch a royalty to mine “an area of about

200 paces in circumference” and employed the local miners to do the labor. 285 Tavernier documents the poverty and misery of these laborers: “These poor people only earn 3 pagodas per annum, although they must be men who thoroughly understand their work.

As their wages are so small they do not manifest any scruple, when searching in the sand, about concealing a stone for themselves when they can, and being naked, save for a small cloth which covers their private parts, they adroitly contrive to swallow it.286 ” Whether the result of poverty or policy, the scant clothing of the miners minimizes the possibility of diamonds smuggled out in folds of cloth or pockets. Thus, the workers turn jewel mules, rendering their bodies receptacles for stone. Tavernier goes on to tell the story of one miner who tucked a diamond of almost two carats into “the corner of his eye” before being caught and relieved of the stone and who knows what else. 287

In Methwold and Tavernier, Indian diamonds do not cast themselves from the waters into European palms, in the manner of the pearls that Fletcher’s Armusia details.

Instead, they arrive through the touch of human and stone—a touch that does not

283 Methold, Pvrchas, 1003. 284 Ball glosses Raolconda as “the modern Ramulkota” or the place that we today identify with Ramallukota (xv); See Tavernier, Ball, introduction; On sultanates of the Deccan Plateau, see Omar Khalidi, Romance of the Golconda Diamonds (Middletown, NJ: Mapin 1999), 20. 285 Tavernier, 53. 286 Tavernier, 59. 287 Tavernier, 60; Khalidi relays a somewhat similar, if much more extreme, story connected with the Pitt Regent diamond in which “a sharp-eyed slave working in the Partiyala mines in 1701” carved into his own leg in order to hid the “451 [carat]” stone (57); See Khalidi. 99 necessarily promise affective or phenomenological reorientation for the laborer. The

Indian diamond writes back into the story the human bodies that subtend the western fantasy of prelapsarian plentitude. One could argue that the diamond’s ability to do so derives from the eyewitness reporting of Methwold and Tavernier. In other words, the medieval diamond myth of Marco Polo and Mandeville could not offer this account of diamond labor because the writers did not know of it. Yet perhaps diamonds had always divulged their dependence upon laboring bodies, regardless of genre. Perhaps it is we who need to learn to listen, to read differently. Indeed, if we return to Marco Polo’s version of the labor-free myth that saturated pre- and early modern diamonds, and we follow the diamond, then we come upon bodies at work with the gem, albeit animal rather than human. One simply has to be willing to seek out their reflection in the facets of the stone.

Marco Polo actually immediately revises his initial description of facile diamond harvesting. The “gorges” of which he writes, presumably within the Deccan plateau, might house untold numbers of diamonds, yet they also harbor “heat…so great that it is almost intolerable” and “serpents of immense size and girth…exceedingly venomous and noxious….” 288 As a result, those humans who desire the diamonds outsource a system of retrieval, by utilizing eagles; animal meat (sheep’s flesh in many accounts); and the diamond’s love of fat.289 Eagles circle over the diamond valleys, feasting upon the serpents so fearful to the humans. “The men” of Marco Polo’s narrative thus bait the birds by tossing “flesh imbrued in blood” into the abyss, which promptly adheres to the diamonds decorating the canyon floor. The eagles retrieve both “flesh” and gems. The

288 Polo, 273 289 On the “‘lithophilic’” property of diamonds, see Finlay, 322-323. 100 humans then follow one of two courses. They either track the eagles to their landing place on the valley’s rim and shoo off the birds: “Scared by their sudden approach, the eagles fly away, leaving the flesh behind…diamonds in plenty embedded in it.” Or the men gather and sort through eagle shit speckled with diamonds—the result of the stones travelling through the birds’ digestive system along with the meat that they swallowed. In this moment, the eagles in Marco Polo’s Travels and the miners in Tavernier’s Voyages eerily touch in the diamond’s journey through body cavities, animal and human.

Marco Polo’s revision, Methwold’s and Tavernier’s accounts, merely serve as precursors to the recent work of journalists who, over the past decade, have cataloged the butchery done in the name of the diamond in some parts of Africa—murders and maiming directly sponsored by corrupt governments and rebel groups and indirectly

(although one might want to put pressure on this term) by corporations disseminating the stones in the global market. 290 The irony of the sanguine diamond’s status as “the world’s premiere symbol of love and devotion” is not lost on journalists like Greg

Campbell, author of the book turned blockbuster film Blood Diamonds .291 While the diamond ring of early modern England did not partake in the ubiquity of today’s engagement ring, historical record and portraiture demonstrate the popularity of the stone as a matrimonial marker. Admittedly, for better or worse, Renaissance diamonds did not have behind them the force of De Beers, whose 1947 “‘A Diamond is Forever’” marketing campaign rendered the stone the material guarantee of marriage. 292 Still, even

290 See note 15. 291 Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones , prologue (Boulder: Westview, 2002), xxv. 292 On the creation of the De Beers marketing campaign by Frances Gerety’s of the N.W. Ayer firm, see Finlay, 347-48. 101 without such a concentrated commercial strategy, diamonds glinted from wedding rings during the Renaissance. Historian Diana Scarisbrick writes, “Although many people made do with plain wedding bands inscribed with their names, the date, and a message or posy…those who could afford them still preferred diamonds.” 293 But what the early modern diamond lays bare are the bodies upon which the metaphorical diamond—of beauty, of purity, of marriage—is set. And the presence of these bodies says something about the nature of a “straight” desire, supposedly sanctioned and sanitized. Diamonds have always been blood diamonds. Those of us wearing diamond wedding rings have as much blood on our hands as modern corporations, early modern companies, and medieval and renaissance mythmakers: diamond blood for which we would prefer not to take responsibility but blood nevertheless that refutes the myths that we continue to tell ourselves about the stones.

Mythic Diamond Deals and the Diamond Dealing Subject

In 1582, Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple, elder cousin to the perhaps better known author and compiler who shared his name, wrote a letter to “a principall English

Factor,” presumably of the recently formed Turkey Company. 294 This “master S.,” as

293 Diana Scarisbrick, “The Diamond Love and Marriage Ring,” The Nature of Diamonds , 163-70, esp. 165. 294 “Remembrances for Master S,” in Richard Haklvyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiqves and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1599), Huntington STC 12626a, sig. O3r-O5r, esp.O3r; In The Principal Navigations (1599-1600), the younger Richard Hakluyt included this and other letters of his cousin to whom he credits his own fascination with geography and trade and to whom scholars attribute some kind of involvement in early modern England’s stirrings toward participation in an increasingly global market. On the Hakluyts’ involvement in early modern mercantile ventures see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood , Forms of Nationhood : The Elizabethan Writing of England , introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 102 Hakluyt addresses him, was preparing to leave for Constantinople, the center of the

Ottoman Empire with whom Elizabeth I had opened trade relations in 1580. In the letter, the elder Hakluyt insists upon the importation of dyestuffs from Turkey into England. He intimates to master S. that in sending back to England anile seedlings—a plant akin to indigo that yields a valuable blue dye—he will be inheriting and furthering the patriotic path set by his forefathers. The attorney enumerates all those items that “good men” with a care for their country have transplanted to England: Damask and Musk roses, artichokes, Turkey cocks and hens, apricots, and tulips. However, the elder Hakluyt also makes a rather a shocking confession. In an astonishing passage, he writes:

And if this care had not bene heretofore in our ancesters, then had our life bene

sauage now, for then we had not had Wheat nor Rie, Peaze nor Beanes, Barley

nor Oats, Peare nor Applie, Uine nor many other profitable and pleasant plants,

Bull nor Cow, Sheepe nor Swine, Horse nor Mare, Cocke nor Hen, nor a number

of other things that we inioy, without which our life were to be sayd

barbarous …. 295

1992), 1-18; Mancal; and George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961); As Parks notes, the exact nature of the elder Hakluyt’s involvement in burgeoning mercantile ventures to both the East and the West remains unclear. However, from the elder Hakluyt’s “memoranda that were subsequently printed by his careful cousin” (40), Parks suggests him as “at least a promoter or a shareholder and additionally a consultant” ( 44); The citations for the elder Hakluyt’s letter to Master S., as well as the younger Hakluyt’s dedication to Cecil (see below), derive from a 1599-1600 copy of The Principal Navigations housed at the Huntington Library (STC 12626a), available on EEBO (see above for full citation); Elizabeth’s letter to Akbar, cited at note 193, and some materials relating to Fitch’s travel (see below) derive from the Hakluyt Society’s print edition of the 1599-1600 Principal Navigations.

295 Hakluyt, STC 12626a, sig. O5r; my emphasis. 103 The attorney reveals that only with the importation of foreign goods has England been dragged from the mire of a savage pre-history. (Indeed, not even wool, that most English of English commodities, proves English.) Objects external to England have initiated it into the pages of history and thus enabled the island to assume a teleological arc toward potential mercantile competitiveness and eventual dominance. 296

The elder Hakluyt thus tells such a different story from John of Gaunt in

Shakespeare’s Richard II : “This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by nature for herself against infection…This happy breed of men, this little world, / This precious stone set in the silver sea…this England.”297 The anonymous writer of the 1436 poem

The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye would seem to share John of Gaunt’s imagining of

England as a salutary space unto itself. Denigrating the import of foreign potions and medicines, the poet proclaims the efficacy of England to heal itself with the natural commodities of its own land: “Wythowten helpe of any other londe, / Whych ben by wytte and prattike bothe ifounde, / That all ill humors might be voided sure, / Whych that we garde with oure Englysh cure….”298 Over a century later, the elder Hakluyt, however,

296 As scholars from Daniel Vitkus to Richmond Barbour have so well documented, in the late sixteenth century until well into the seventeenth, England proved little more than a bit player, outmaneuvered by both continental actors, like Spain and Portugal, and the powerful empires of the East. As Barbour describes in “Power and Distant Display: Early English ‘Ambassadors’ in Moghul India,” “Theirs [English mercantile ambassadors to the East] were not the ‘improvisations of power’ theorized by Greenblatt but something closer to the efforts of resourceful servants, in the satiric comedies of Plautus, Terence, or Jonson, to wrest advantage from circumstances beyond their control” (352). 297 William Shakespeare, Richard II , The Norton Shakespeare: Histories , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton: 1997), 422-482, 1.4.41-50.

298 The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye : A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power , 1436, ed. George Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 356-359. 104 would seem to suggest that not only did England require foreign medicine but that it also needed inoculation from its very self. 299

Reference to the OED’s entry for barbarous is here instructive. Not until the third definition of the word do we find a correspondence between barbarous and a lack of civilization. And the etymological note makes clear that this denotation pertained primarily to the English usage of the term: “The later uses occur first in English, the Latin and Greek senses appearing only in translators or historians.” Another definition obtained to the word barbarous and found equal place in the early modern English lexicon. From the Greek βάρβαρος and/or the Roman barbar , barbarous in both languages modified an individual outside of the purview of the realm and thus foreign:

“The sense-development in ancient times was (with the Greeks) ‘foreign, non-Hellenic,’ later ‘outlandish, rude, brutal’; (with the Romans) ‘not Latin nor Greek,’ then ‘pertaining to those outside the Roman empire’….” A barbarous England was thus an England not only outside of history but also an England foreign to its very self. It was an England that bore the marks of an intrinsic estrangement.300 Scholars like Steven Mullaney, and to a certain extent Lloyd Kermode, have suggested this self-foreignness as that which enables a kind of proto-imperialist discourse. 301 An estranged English self is a self capable of

299 In employing the language of infection and inoculation, I here echo the work of Lloyd Kermode in Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama . 300 “barbarous, adj.”. OED Online. November 2010. Oxford University Press. 15 February 2011 . 301 The possibility of an inherent English instability prompted a good deal of anxiety in sixteenth and seventeenth-century writings. As the work of scholars, like Mary Floyd Wilson and Sara Warneke, has well demonstrated, contemporary musings as to the cause of this English whimsy proliferate from speculations about geo-humoralism to assumptions about the lunar pull on an island. This English mutability was particularly on display when it came to novel fashions. As Warneke writes, “Doomed to inconstancy, 105 constructing a stable identity out of the syncretic accouterments of other nations. To be

English, both Mullaney and Kermode suggest respectively, is indeed not to be English .302

On Mullaney’s “place of the stage,” the English become a people capable of “rehearsing” any “culture” and then consuming it: “…a process that begins in the adoption of the strange, and that ends with a full entrance into and performance of alien and residual cultures, consummately rehearsed and thus consummately foreclosed.”303 Put differently, the English subject, even the proto-imperialist English subject, readily and easily participates in luring objects from both Europe and the Orient to an England peripheral only to those beyond its borders.

The elder Hakluyt preempts the theorization of Mullaney and Kermode by some

500-plus years. The attorney articulates foreign things as that which can bridge over not only the gap between a detemporalized England and a future-oriented chronology but also the abyss within Englishness itself. Tulip petals, vegetal vines, apricot pits, tufts of wool—these foreign objects can fill up the lacunae. And once grafted onto the skin of the English landscape, they can become the marker of national pride: signifiers that point back not to their country of origin but to an always already England. Following the logic of the commodity, the elder Hakluyt remembers the diverse histories of objects “brought

the English became a people addicted to novelty, to newfangledness, an addiction that many early modern Englishmen feared would result in the inevitable destruction of English society” (881); See Mary Floyld-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) and Sara Warneke, “A Taste for Newfangledness: The Destructive Potential of Novelty in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 881-896. 302 The notion that to be English is not to be English is a paraphrase of a comment made by Professor Gil Harris at a December 4, 2009 seminar, hosted by the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, that featured Daniel Vitkus. Professor Harris’ original statement is as follows: “The English fail to be English which ironically makes them English.” 303 Mullaney, 86. 106 into this realme” only to erase those pasts.304 For him, these things have seemingly become naturalized citizens. Their past, present, and future is England. The elder

Hakluyt permits foreign things the agency to civilize the island; however, once arrived and settled, they are to melt into the English terroir of which they are now a part. The attorney instructs master S. upon the discovery of anile, “…to send the same into this realme by seed or by root in barrell of earth, with all the whole order of sowing, setting, planting, replanting…that it may become a naturall commodity in this realme….”305

Yet we might do well to ask to what extent such naturalization is possible.

Transplants are forever travelers, flickering between different times, places, and bodies even within the presence of “English” soil. 306 They are also witnesses to a protection program’s failed attempt to overwrite the past. Anile leaves, flowers, and roots would carry within them the traces—what Sara Ahmed following Marx terms “the congealed histories”—of other times, other places, and other laboring hands. And who is to say if the wayward shoots of anile would bend to the unskilled fingers of English cultivators and dyers, despite the instruction of Turkish artisans? Indeed, even the elder Hakluyt’s mention of the blue dye seems to instigate a seeping that seems beyond his control in that the attorney’s desire for anile forces his allusion to a barbarous England. And with the entrance of barbarism , all of the attorney’s listing of foreign objects turned natural commodities becomes but a compulsive return to an English lack. This proliferation of things in the elder Hakluyt’s epistle ultimately circles around England’s dependency upon the agency of objects—an agency that is not necessarily within English control.

304 Hakluyt, STC 12626a, sig. O5r. 305 Ibid, O3v; my emphasis. 306 Ahmed cites an interesting passage from Marx and Engels’ writing on Feuerbach in which they discuss the labor behind the transplanting of cherry trees; See Ahmed, 40-41. 107 The importation of the foreign could hardly cure England from an intrinsic foreignness—a point underscored by Kermode and thus distinguishing his work from

Mullaney’s. Such objects could perhaps momentarily plaster over the gap of a national wound. But inevitably, travelers that they are, they would wander, refusing to stay in place or to occlude the fissure for which they are stand-ins. 307 Of a foreign presence in

England, Kermode writes, “If the steady intake of alien elements—foreign bodies— promotes representations of an Englishness vaccinated against ‘impurity’ from the outside, it should be made clear early on that such an idea of exclusive identity is a fiction.”308 As Kermode seems to suggest, “viral” denaturation by no means precludes the terrors and pleasures of penetration. 309 And the making of this fiction inevitably prompts from the elder Hakluyt a ceaseless glance backward to imports that refuse to follow and to an English history that never quite straightens out.

In some respects, the elder cousin’s letter to master S., both engaged in a process of myth-making and simultaneously denying the maintenance of such a myth, could serve as a template for aspects of his younger cousin’s project. In his dedicatory epistle for the second volume of the expanded second edition of The Principal Navigations (1599-

1600), addressed to Robert Cecil, the younger Hakluyt fingers so many of the threads already strung by his cousin and mentor. He too voices the integrity of an Eastern market in English cloth (cloth, of course, woven from English wool) to the economic well-being

307 A useful addition to this conversation would be Gil Harris’ work in Sick Economies on England’s denigration of the foreign and embrace of the global; see Harris, Sick Economies . 308 Kermode, 7. 309 Professor Madhavi Menon’s discussion of “the pleasures of infection” in relation to Derrida’s Dissemination in various graduate seminars has been enormously influential in the development of my own thinking. I would underscore here, as would Professor Menon, that penetration need not legislate phallocentrism. 108 of the nation. And like his cousin, Hakluyt the clergyman positions the English merchant within an ancient lineage constituted from patriotic endeavors. The younger Hakluyt likens his work to the function of the death mask in ancient Rome, the sight of which was to stir the present generation into action through a memory of the one past. The Principal

Navigations is thus to serve as a kind of way station for the mercantile pilgrim—a reminder of future glories to be had by maintaining the course.

Almost two decades after his cousin’s letter to master S., the younger Hakluyt would seem to posit the letters and travel narratives of the early factors of the Turkey

Company (to which in all likelihood master S. belonged) as such figurative masks worthy of attention. He writes to Salisbury, “ Lastly, I haue here put downe at large the happie renuing and much increasing of our interrupted trade in all the Leuant , accomplished by the great charges and speciall industrie of the worshipfull and worthy Citizens, Sir

Edward Osborne Knight, M. Richard Staper , and M. William Hareborne , together with the league for traffike onely between her Maiestie and the Grand Signior….”310 Staper and Osborne are directly named in Elizabeth I’s initial patent for trading with the

Ottoman Empire, with Osborne as the governor of the Turkey Company (reissued as the

Levant Company in January of 1592). Hakluyt then makes particular mention of the mercantile ventures of a group of men on the behalf of Staper and Osborne’s company.

He notes “…the last great voyage by M. Ralph Fitch , who with M. Iohn Newbery and two other consorts departed from London with her Maiesties letters written effectually in their fauour to the kings of Cambaia and China in the yere 1583, who in the yeere 1591

310 Hakluyt, STC 12626a Sig. *3r-v. 109 like another Paulus Venetus returned home to the place of his departure ….”311 In 1582,

Ralph Fitch and John Newbery set sail for Aleppo aboard the Tiger in the company of

John Eldred, Ralph Allen, William Skinner, William Shales (all presumably factors of the

Turkey Company), a painter named James Story, and a jeweler called William Leeds. 312

Once in Aleppo, the group acquired from a base factory what appears to be English merchandise before proceeding to Baghdad and Basra.313 Allen and Skinner remained behind at Baghdad with a portion of the commodities; Shales and Eldred sought to set up shop in Basra; and Fitch, Newbery, Story, and Leeds were to make for India with an amount of both goods and cash and letters of introduction from Elizabeth I to the Moghul

Emperor Akbar and to the unnamed “King of China.”

Thus, Allen and Skinner, Shales and Eldred, Fitch and Newbery appeared, to draw upon the elder Hakluyt’s words to master S, “the sitter[s] in forren parts to serue

[their] Countrey” (Hakluyt 162). They were poised to push English goods into Eastern markets and potentially to acquire Turkish and Indian commodities that could be put to use back home. Put differently, at the very least, they would be enabling England to resume a progressive line pointed toward economic power, a merited place on the global stage. And they would be ensuring that foreign commodities—the very things, according to the elder Hakluyt, that had made England—would continue to find their way to

311 Ibid, *3v. 312 I have pieced together the narrative to follow about the travels of particularly Eldred, Fitch, Newbery, Leeds, and Story from a variety of primary sources, including the letters of Fitch, Newbery, and Eldred, the travel narrative of Fitch, and the account of Linschoten cited from his Itinerario . (The citations for which follow in the course of the chapter.) Only taken together do they offer a composite image of the nature of the trade expedition. 313 My understanding of the standard practice of English trade in the East (i.e. retrieving English goods from a base factory) derives from a conversation with Professor Gil Harris on February 8, 2011. 110 England where they could be subsumed into the project of national reification. As

Richard Helgerson writes of Hakluyt’s text, “In his Voyages , historical narrative is proleptic. It anticipates by enabling future accomplishment.”314 And for Hakluyt, Fitch enables a line to be drawn from the English past into the English future—a future of profit in the East.

Told thus, Fitch’s travels become a journey, a narrative of departure and return.

According to Historian William Foster, whether or not Fitch sailed back to England in possession of troves of Eastern luxuries or currency remains unclear due to the

Company’s incomplete records from 1590 to 1600. 315 Foster thinks it unlikely: “Fitch had evidently not brought home a fortune, for ere long he was back again [in] the Levant.

In August 1596 he was trading at Aleppo….”316 Hakluyt makes no mention of material gain. Nevertheless, he prizes the resultant narrative with its evidence of an Englishman treading upon foreign places, making footprints into which the feet of countrymen could one day fall. Like a mercantile bildungsroman, the numerous disasters of Fitch and his fellows are subsumed into the end result of knowledge, intellectual capital with which the

Turkey cum Levant Company could invest. Yet such a story of resplendent circularity can only be told by reading over the moments that diverge from this plot. It can only be told by granting the beginning and the ending more value than what comes between, which, even then, might entail making Fitch’s account into something that it was not. It

314 Helgerson, 165. 315 This is a point on which further research is required. I will need to investigate the status of the Turkey/Levant Company records for this period. I would also like to locate the bill of landing for the ship on which Fitch returned to England. 316 William Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1933), 107.

111 can only be told by turning one’s eyes from the glimmer of Indian diamonds—diamonds that intervene with a narrative voice quite distinct from that of Hakluyt.

Fitch never asserts diamonds as a goal of the trek that he and Newbery, Story and

Leeds, make into India. He references the gems but never speaks of handling them or of bartering for them. Diamonds, though, continually appear at the edges of Fitch’s story, obliquely signaling their place at its center. Until we learn to read with them, to understand Fitch’s account through them, we initially note them through porte-paroles.

Both human and non, these diamond ambassadors circulate within and around Fitch’s account. Andrew Cockburn remarks upon the diamond’s reliance upon such messengers: he explains that De Beers learned of diamonds in Botswana only through the presence of garnets and ilmenites, “minerals associated with diamond deposits,” that “helpful termites” had hauled to the earth’s surface “over millennia.”317 Like Shakespeare’s Don

Pedro, these lithic and insectile suitors woo on the diamond’s behalf. In Fitch’s narrative, a Dutch adventurer, an English jeweler, and the land of India itself stand in the stead of garnets, ilmenites, and termites. Whether wittingly or no, they provide us with an entrée for moving along the lines of the diamond. 318

The Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten first encountered Fitch, Newbery,

Story, and Leeds in Goa where the Englishmen had been sent as prisoners to be interrogated by the Portuguese Viceroy Don Francisco de Mascarenhas. In 1596,

317 Andrew Cockburn, “Diamonds: The Real Story,” National Geographic March 2002, accessed 30 March 2011; The image of “messengers” I take from Haylie Swenson’s lovely work on Michel Serres and animal messengers in Marie de France. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2002/03/01/html/ft_20020301.1.html, 3. 318 Here I am, of course, channeling Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of lines of flight; See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987). 112 Linschoten published an account of his interactions with the men and of his eventual efforts on their behalf in his popular Itinerario , printed in English in 1598 by John

Wolfe.319 Hakluyt excerpted this section from the Itinerario in the second edition of The

Principal Navigations , including it directly after Fitch’s own travel narrative. Since parting with Eldred and Shales in Basra, the foursome had courted misadventure. The group had anticipated journeying directly from Basra into India, yet a problem with their translators and their own inability to speak “the Indian tongue” forced a detour. In a letter from Babylon on July 15, 1583, Newbery writes, “…from hence to Baliara [Basra], and so to Ormus, but my going to Ormus is more of necessitie, then for any good will I haue to the place: for I want a man to goe with me that hath the Indian tongue, the which is the onely cause of my going thither for to take one there ….”320 A small island off of the coast of Persia, Ormuz was held by the Portuguese who were in turn controlled by the

Spanish. In 1580 upon the death of the Portuguese King Henry, Spain’s Philip II had successfully asserted his right to the Portuguese throne, ousting rival Portuguese claimant

Antonio, Prior of Crato. Although, as Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales notes, Elizabeth did not at this time involve herself in the Portuguese/Spanish “succession dispute,” relations between England and Spain were already quite fraught. 321 The tenuous amity between the two countries upon Elizabeth I’s ascension had progressively deteriorated throughout the 1560s and 1570s due to “trade wars,” continually shifting European

319 Eds. Ivo Kamps and Jyostna Singh, Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave 2001), 150. 320 [Samvel Purchas], Pvrchas His Pilgrims (London, 1625), 1642. 321 Magdalena De Pazzis Pi Corrales, “The View from Spain: Distant Images and English Political Reality in the Late Sixteenth Century.” Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554-1604 . Ed. Anne Cruz. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 13-27, esp. 23. 113 alliances, and relentless English privateering against Spanish ships.322 By the time of

Fitch et al.’s departure for the Ottoman in 1583, the situation had devolved further with

Elizabeth denying audience to the Spanish Ambassador Bernadino de Mendoza and abetting the Dutch revolt against Philip.323 Thus, perhaps the Portuguese (and therefore

Spanish) representatives in Ormuz were predisposed to entertain the charges brought against Fitch, Newbery, Story, and Leeds shortly after their arrival.

The account of Linschoten, as well as letters penned by Fitch, Newbery and

Eldred, attribute the Englishmen’s arrest to the machinations of competing Venetian merchants. Linschoten writes:

They being thus [aryved] in Ormus, hyred a Shop, and began to sell their

wares : which the Italians perceiving, whose Factors continue there (as I

sayd before) and fearing that those Englishmen, finding good vent for their

commodities in that place wold be resident therein, and so daylie increase,

which would be no small losse and hinderance unto them, did presently

invent all the subtile meanes they could to hinder them : and to that end

they went unto the Captaine of Ormus, as then called Don Gonsalo de

Meneses, telling him that there were certaine Englishmen come into

Ormus, that were sent only to spy the Country, and said further, that they

were Heretickes….”324

322 Ibid, 20, 23. 323 Ibid, 23. 324 Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies , ed. Arthur Coke Burnell,vol. 2. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885),160. 114 The correspondences of Newbery and Eldred identify a Venetian named Michael

Stropene as the primary orchestrator of the plot against the English. 325 In an epistle from

Ormuz to Eldred in Basra, Newbery relates that Stropene’s imputations of espionage specifically suggested the Englishmen as working on behalf of the exiled Antonio, Prior of Crato, Philip II’s former rival to the Portuguese throne. Yet Newbery and Eldred surmise that the motivation for the arrest lied as much with the Spanish and Portuguese as it did with Stropene. Both suspect the Englishmen’s imprisonment and questioning to be retribution for Drake’s recent volleys against a Portuguese galleon in the Moluccas.326

Regardless of the cause, the Portuguese Captain of Ormuz shipped the four men to Goa for interrogation by the Viceroy Don Francisco de Mascarenhas.

Terror and incomprehension limn Fitch, Newbery, Story, and Leeds’ initial days in the Goan prison: for in addition to lacking the “Indian tongue,” they could not speak the Portuguese one either. Two of the four men could, however, communicate in Dutch.

They were thus visited by a Dutch Jesuit—a caricature of monastic greed in Linschoten’s account—who sought to convince the Englishmen and apparently their gold to join the

Jesuit “fellowship” in return for protection from the machine of the Inquisition.327 James

Story capitulated: “…partly for feare, and partlie for want of meanes [to relieve himselfe], promised them to become a Iesuite: and although they knew [and well perceived] he was not any of those that had the treasure, yet because he was a Painter,

325 Fitch offers a brief account of the arrest but does not name Stropene. 326 Indeed, Newbery apparently said as much to one of his Portuguese interrogators in Goa. In a letter to Leonard Poore, he writes, “…and so perceiving that this did greatly grieve them, I asked, if they would be revenged of me for that which M. Drake had done? To the which he answered, No: although his meaning was to the contrary” (Hakluyt, Hakluyt Societ, 5:460). 327 van Linschoten, 161-162. 115 whereof they are but few in India, and that they had great need of him to paint their

Church…they made this Painter a Iesuite….”328 Fitch, Newbery, and Leeds remained in prison, yet they soon learned of two other Dutchman residing in Goa who held positions of possible influence: Bernardt Burcherts and Jan Linschoten.

Both Burcherts and Linschoten were in the retinue of the Archbishop of Goa,

Vincente de Fonseca. 329 Burcherts and Linschoten met with the prisoners and subsequently lobbied their employer to intercede. Linschoten writes, “With that wee departed from them promising them to do our best : and in the ende we obtained so much of the Archbishoppe, that he went unto the Vice-roy to delyver our petition, and perswaded him so well, that hee was content to set them at libertie.”330 In a letter from

Goa dated shortly after his release, Newbery writes favorably of the Archbishop,

Burcherts, and Linschoten, detailing their kindness: “The archbishop is a very good man, who hath two yong men to his servantes, the one of them was borne at Hamborough, and is called Bernard Borgers: and the other was borne at Enchuysen, whose name is John

Linscot, who did us great pleasure: for by them the archbishop was many times put in minde of us.”331 Fitch relays that by the end of December he, Newbery, and Leeds had gained their release, with the townsman Andreas Taborer agreeing to stand surety for

328 Ibid, 162. 329 According to Arthur Coke Burnell, Linschoten obtained a position with the Archbishop through a brother’s influence at court. Both he and this brother, apparently referred to by Linschoten as ‘Williem Thin,’ traveled to India aboard the same ship as the Archbishop, with Williem serving as the ship’s “clerk” [Burnell definitively rejects the translation of “pursur”]. Linschoten arrived in Goa with the Archbishop on September 21, 1583; See van Linschoten, Burnell, xxiv-xxv. 330 Van Linschoten, 163. 331 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 5: 460. 116 them for 2150 duckets.332 But on April 5, 1584, fearful of renewed threats of trial and torture in Portugal, Fitch, Newbery, and Leeds surreptitiously slipped away into the kingdom of Golconda. Fitch writes, “Whereupon we presently determined rather to seeke our liberties, then to bee in danger for ever to be slaves in the country, for it was told us we should have ye strapado.” 333 Behind them they left those who had helped them without explanation and with added suspicion from the local authorities. Thus, perhaps understandably, a subtle tone of bitterness works its way into Linschoten’s account of the incident: “Which being concluded among them, they durst not make knowne to any man, neither did they credite us so much, [as to shewe us their minds therein]….”334

So much of Linschoten’ description of Fitch et al.’s imprisonment, release, and escape is surprising: the intercession of the Archbishop of Goa—a Portuguese appointed to the post by Philip II 335 —on the behalf of the subjects of the excommunicated English queen; the personal risk taken by Linschoten, a Dutch Catholic in Spanish/Portugese

India; the readiness of Fitch and Newbery to leave both Story and an amount commodities in Goa. Yet, amidst all of this intrigue and adventure, I find particularly astounding the way in which Linschoten describes the Englishmen’s mercantile intents.

According to Linschoten, the men are after “precious Stones”:

332 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 5: 471; Linschoten reports that the Englishmen’s surety was “2000. Pardawes” granted by “a Citizen of the towne” See van Linschoten, 163. 333 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 471-72. Fitch cites the date of the threesome’s escape as April 1585. Yet, as Foster has noted, the substitution of 1585 for 1584 seems to be an error: other sources would seem to corroborate a shorter imprisonment and stay in Goa. Michael Edwardes disagrees wholly accepting Fitch’s dating. However, I am inclined to side with Foster. See Michael Edwardes, Ralph Fitch: Elizabethan in the Indies (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); William Foster, Early Travels in India: 1583-1619 (Delhi: S. Chand, 1968); and Foster, England’s Quest . 334 van Linschoten, 164. 335 Linschoten, Burnell, 8. 117 And although those wares amounted unto great summes of money,

notwithstanding it was but onlie a shadow or colour, thereby to give no occasion

to be mistrusted, [or seen into] : for that their principall intent was to buy great

quantities of precious Stones, as Diamantes, Pearles, Rubies, &c. to the which

ende they brought with them a greate summe of money and Gold, and that verie

secretly, [not to be deceived or robbed thereof], or to run into anie danger for the

same. 336

Perhaps Linschoten’s assertion surprises because its directness contrasts so distinctly with the silence of Newbery, Eldred, and especially Fitch, the three men whose writings

Hakluyt and later Purchas include for publication. Neither Newbery nor Eldred in their letters nor Fitch in his epistles or travel narrative speaks explicitly of the foursome’s intent to trade for gems. Eldred writes generally of Fitch and Newbery’s plan to make for

“the Indies”: “…and Master Newberie, and Raph Fitch, with the Ieweller and Painter, are determined to proceed for the Indies, and out of this wee carrie to Balsara, hee will take out his foure hundred pounds in Commodities for the Indies….”337 Newbery complains of poor sales but never whispers of gemstone transactions. And, as I have already mentioned, Fitch maintains an odd distance from gemstones, particularly diamonds, observing their appearance in marketplaces, referencing their geography, but never speaking with a voice of mercantile experience let alone Cohen’s “lithic intimacy.” 338

336 Ibid, 160. 337 Pvrchas, 1644. 338 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 16. 118 Yet Linschoten is insistent. And he is a man who knows something of stone. The eight chapters preceding his recording of the Englishmen’s imprisonment all detail the characteristics and valuation of precious stones. He writes at length about diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls, spending several pages upon the mining and pricing of diamonds specifically. Linschoten describes the movement of diamonds out of the earth in the hills of the Deccan Plateau and into market stands at “a Faire” in Lispor (present- day Achalpur) where “the Bainianes and Gusurates of Cambaia” buy them presumably for resale in Goa.339 With great attention to detail, he goes on to record the process of evaluating a diamond. For according to the Dutchman, the one Quilat [carat] diamond provides the point of comparison whereby all other stones are judged: “First you must understand that the Diamant is the king of al precious stones, because it is solde by weight, and hath [a very] certain thicknes, whereby it is [ordinarily] wrought, for when it is greater, it is nothing worth, and being lesse it will soone be perceived….”340 A fine ruby and an emerald of average quality might ultimately surpass a diamond in value, yet the diamond remains the point of return for merchants making such determinations.341

Thus one is rather inclined to believe Linschoten when he voices his suspicions about the

Turkey Company merchants’ clandestine designs for diamonds and other gemstones.

And the presence of one individual among Fitch’s quartet would seem to evince

Linschoten’s surmise: the jeweler, William Leeds.

On Whitsunday in April of 1584, Fitch, Newbery, and Leeds left Goa on the pretense of a day of leisure along the river. They quickly crossed over the water and did

339 van Linschoten, 137. 340 Ibid, 145. 341 Ibid 150, 154. 119 not look back. In recounting the Englishmen’s abrupt departure, Linschoten references

Leeds: “…but in the end they determined with themselues to depart from thence, and secretly by meanes of other friendes they imployed their money in precious stones; which the better to effect, one of them was a Jeweller, and for the same purpose came with them.342 Whether or not the three men converted their funds into easily portable (and concealable) gemstones remains a matter of “he said; he said.” Linschoten positively asserts the sale, while Fitch, rather typically, makes no mention of it. But the accompaniment and ostensible function of William Leeds appears fairly incontrovertible.

One surmises that Leeds must have been integral to the mercantile ventures of Fitch and

Newbery. The determination of the painter James Story to remain behind in Goa under

Jesuit protection seems to have caused little consternation for the Turkey Company merchants. In a letter to Leonard Poore, Fitch writes, “The painter is in the cloister of S.

Paul, and is of their order, and liketh there very well.”343 Perhaps Story had joined the expedition in an effort to make his own fortune, and thus his continuation with the party would have been of little consequence, at least economically. 344 However, if Fitch and

Newbery’s journey into India centered, at least in part, on the acquisition of diamonds and other gems, then Leeds’s knowledge would have been crucial. As a jeweler, Leeds would have been fluent in identifying uncut stones and in ascertaining the quality of cut gems. Leeds could not then number amongst the left behind, at least not yet.

Both Linschoten and Leeds point to diamonds as one of the objects whose glint blazed Fitch and Newbery’s trail across India. But so too does the land of India itself. In

342 In this instance, I have cited Linschoten from Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigation , as I did not have access to the Burnell edition; See Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 5: 510. 343 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 5: 464. 344 I believe that Foster makes a similar supposition. 120 his work for the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, George Harlow posits that before the discovery of a New World diamond cache in the 1700s, India existed as the primary source of the gem.345 The kingdom of Golconda, and to a lesser extent that of

Bijapur, in the Deccan Plateau provided some of the richest diamond sources in India.346

From Golconda came the famed stones of name, passing from hand to hand and king to king until coming to rest in places far from India like the Tower of London (the Koh-i-

Noor) and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC (the Hope

Diamond).347 Of Golconda, Cockburn writes, “Of all the old diamond kingdoms, this was the most famous, its very name still a synonym for riches centuries later. The Koh-i-

Noor, the Hope Diamond, the Regent, and other stones famous for their dramatic and bloody histories—the original conflict diamonds—passed through here before drifting to the outside world by way of purchase, bribery, theft, or conquest.”348 By the thirteenth century, diamonds had entered European trade in earnest by way of Goa and had begun to ornament the fashion of the aristocracy.349 However, these small, uncut stones hardly rivaled the larger stones whispered about in European travel journals that India retained for its own kings or that surfaced in Persian and Ottoman collections as the result of conquest or perhaps trade.350

As already witnessed by the account of Linschoten and as will be seen in this chapter’s final section, early modern travel narratives continually trace the lines connecting India to diamonds—perhaps evincing both the writers’ desire to speak of the

345 Harlow, “Following the History of Diamonds,” The Nature of Diamonds . 346 Khalidi, 20. 347 Khalidi, 7. 348 Cockburn, 8. 349 Harlow, “Following the History of Diamonds,” The Nature of Diamonds , 128, 130. 350 Ibid, 134. 121 stones and their audience’s willingness to hear of them. But the interwoven myth and history of the Indian diamond and its pharmakon nature well precede the European and

English Renaissance. Omar Khalidi notes two ancient Sanskrit texts that reference diamonds.351 He underscores too the twin narrative of an Indian valley populated by diamonds and watchful serpents in both the Greek tales of the exploits of Alexander the

Great and in the “Islamic tradition” of Sinbad’s voyages.352 As we have seen, in his

Travels , Polo relates a similar story of deadly snakes and precious stones.353 All three versions recount the recovery of diamonds through the use of raw meat and the assistance of eagles. 354 In the case of Sinbad, stories of stone ultimately save both his life and that of his narrator’s, Shahrazad—at least for another night. 355 Admittedly, Sinbad’s initial encounter with the valley of the diamonds almost brings about his death. Dropped by a rukh on a peak overlooking the valley, Sinbad makes his way down to the basin of the

“high ridge.” 356 In the depression he discovers “that its soil was composed of diamonds, the hard and compact stone that is used for boring holes in metals, gems, porcelain and onyx.” 357 Yet the place holds further secrets and wonders: “The valley was full of snakes and serpents as big as palm trees…I stayed there filled with regret at what I had done….”358 The following day a bloody sheep carcass falls before the beleaguered sailor.

351 Khalidi, 8-9. 352 Ibid, 9-10. 353 See the first section of this chapter. 354 Khalidi, 9-10. 355 I here invoke Jeffrey Cohen’s lovely concept and short article, which has profoundly influenced this project; See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Stories of Stone,” postmedieval 1 (2010): 56-63. 356 Trans. Malcolm Lyons, The Arabian Nights Tales of 1001 Nights , vol. 2 (New York, Penguin: 2010), 466. 357 Ibid. 358 Ibid. 122 The sight stirs in Sindbad the memory of a traveler’s tale, a story of a network between diamonds and sheep, birds of prey and men:

I thought of a travellers’ tale that I had heard long ago of the dangers of

the diamond mountains and of how the only way the diamond traders can

reach these is to take and kill a sheep, which they skin and cut up. They

then throw it down from the mountain into the valley and, as it is fresh

when it falls, some of the stones stick to it. The traders leave it until

midday, at which point eagles and vultures swoop down on it and carry it

up to the mountain in their talons. Then the traders come…The flesh is

left for the birds and beasts and the stones are taken back home by the

traders. This is the only way in which they can get hold of the

diamonds. 359

With diamonds in his pockets, Sinbad soars from the valley, strapped to a piece of mutton clasped between the claws of an eagle. The stones grant him passport. Sinbad joins a group of diamond traders, and amidst this new network he encounters “different lands and God’s creation” before finally returning home to Baghdad.360

As Sinbad’s story suggests, diamonds can grant entrée and enable movement.

Trauelling with diamonds can bring its rewards. But they are gems that refuse singularity, slipping between possibilities. Perhaps not surprisingly, water remains the element of comparison for a diamond’s clarity and luster. Under the fourth entry for

“water,” the OED suggests, “The three highest grades of quality in diamonds were formerly known as the first water, second water, and third water; the phrase of the first

359 Ibid, 467. 360 Ibid, 469. 123 water survives in popular use as a designation of the finest quality, often applied to jewels generally.” 361 In many medieval and early modern accounts, “old water” frequently seems to serve as a synonym for “first water.” The beauty of a diamond then exists in its movement, in the way in which light floats and swims through it. As Cohen writes,

“They [diamonds] seem impossibly to be of two elements at once, earth (they are minerals) and water (yet they seem immutable ice).”362 For all of its solidity and hardness, the diamond is a thing of current and liquid, never remaining long in one place.

Perhaps what Steve Mentz writes of Shakespeare ocean is, at least in part, true of the diamond as well: “At the bottom of Shakespeare’s ocean we glimpse treasure and death, but we can’t bring these things to the surface. What we end up looking at, instead, is the water itself.”363 But diamonds do come to the surface. And looking at water is not the same thing as moving along with it, however treacherous the undertow.

Fitch indeed appears awash in the diamond’s waters. After reading of the escape from Goa, Fitch’s reader immediately encounters diamonds. We receive little detail about the “two dayes on foote” that Fitch, Newbery, and Leeds spent and no reflection on what must have been a rather harrowing trek. Instead, Fitch has diamonds and other gems on the tongue: “One of the first townes which we came vnto, is called Bellergan

[Belgaum?]…where there is a great market kept of Diamants, Rubies, Saphires, and many other soft stones.”364 From Belgaum, the three men continued to Bijapur and

361 "water, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/226109?rskey=1l62Ah&result=1&is Advanced=false (accessed May 13, 2014). 362 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 13. 363 Mentz, Steve. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean . New York, Continuum, 2009. 364 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 472. 124 eventually to Golconda, what Khalidi terms “a virtual El Dorado.”365 Michael Edwardes describes this stage of the expedition as follows: “From Bijapur, Fitch and his companions marched northeast and into another of the sultanates, that of Golconda. Now they were moving through a land of fable well known to Europeans from the time of the

Middle Ages and even before. Golconda was a synonym for diamonds, for which the area was famous.”366 Fitch himself confirms this reputation: “Here and in the kingdome of Hidalcan, and in the country of the king of Decan bee the Diamants found of the olde water.”367 From the famed diamond kingdoms, the group tracked northward into the empire of the Great Mughal Emperor Akbar. Akbar had recently moved his capital from

Agra to the newly constructed city of Fatephur Sikri. 368 And Fitch describes the 12 miles separating the two cities as a vast market populated with Indian and Persian merchants dealing in clothe and “of precious stones, both Rubies, Diamants, and Pearles.”369

Diamonds flicker out of Fitch’s story. They emerge almost immediately after the merchants and jeweler gain freedom. And they wink along the route eventually leading into Akbar’s court.

365 Khalidi, 15. 366 Michael Edwardes, Ralph Fitch: Elizabethan in the Indies (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 49. 367 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 472. 368 John Horton Ryley surmises that “Hidalcan” “is probably a corruption of the title of the ruler of…Bijapur, the Adil Shah, or Khan” (61); See John Horton Ryley, Ralph Fitch, England’s Pioneer to India and Burma . London, T. Fisher Unwin., 1899. Online. . 369 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 474. 125 In Fatephur Sikri, Fitch leaves both Newbery and Leeds. Newbery planned to make for Constantinople or Aleppo by way of Persia, sending Fitch on to Bengal and

Pegu (present-day Burma). According to Fitch, Newbery was to return for him in two years “with a shippe out of England.”370 Neither Newbery nor an English ship materialized. Of Newbery, Foster writes in his introduction to Fitch’s narrative,

“…Newbery decided to make his way home overland, and he too disappears from view, dying on the journey, according to Purchas, ‘unknown when or where.’” 371 The jeweler stayed at Akbar’s court in the employ of the Mughal Emperor. Fitch offers no explanation for this decision other than an allusive reference to profit: “I left William

Leades the jewller, in service with the King Zelabdim Echebar in Fatepore, who did entertaine him very well, and gaue him an house and five slaues, an horse, and euery day sixe S.S. in money.”372 Fitch moved on, traveling into northeastern India and eventually on to Pegu, Malacca (present-day Borneo), and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). 373 But even without the experienced eye of Leeds, Fitch continues to watch for diamonds. Of the trade in Malacca, he writes, “Hither come many ships from China & from the Malucos,

Banda, Timor, and from many other Ilands of the Jauas, which bring great store of spices and drugs, and diamants and other Jewels.”374

Diamonds are thus everywhere and nowhere in Fitch’s text. Linschoten, Leeds, and the space of India encourage us to read for diamonds, to read along with them. And

370 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 475. 371 Foster, Early Travels , 5. 372 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 475. As to whether Leeds’ benefit was of a purely personal nature or of benefit to the Company, Fitch does not say. In the above conversation of February 8, 2011, Professor Gil Harris drew my attention to this distinction. 373 Edwardes provides a wonderfully detailed map of Fitch’s travels. 374 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 498. 126 over and over again, Fitch mentions them. Yet he never acknowledges dealing in the gems, never speaks of holding the stones in his hand. Indeed Fitch himself is curiously absent from his own narrative. The result is a travel account that is frequently plodding and often dull. With little evidence, Edwardes attributes this lack of charisma to censorship on the part of Hakluyt who he argues sought only anthropological/ethnological accounts. A more teleological explanation for this seeming self-effacement might urge an early modern sense of subjectivity—a selfhood not yet fully emergent, merely moving towards Bloom’s invention of the human. However, other contemporary accounts, included in The Principal Navigations no less, grant more than glimpses of the personality of the writer and adventurer. As to Fitch’s reticence to describe Golconda and its gems, Edwardes ascribes it to his mercantile constitution:

“Again, Fitch, the down-to-earth merchant, mentions only that the stones were of the finest water. It was not for him to retell the old stories or even to prove them wrong.”375

Certainly, the imperatives of Turkey Company profit and expansion could explain Fitch’s seeming refusal to grant detailed descriptions of the process of acquiring Indian diamonds and of his own role in it. In other words, trade secrets might encourage a certain amount of silence in a published piece. 376 But on this point, Foster appears somewhat skeptical.

Fitch returned to England at the end of April in 1591. While the Turkey Company managed to renew their charter as the Levant Company in 1592, Foster surmises that

Fitch’s relation of the climate in India might have discouraged the principal factors:

As regards the prospects of further trade, Fitch’s report to his employers can

hardly have given much encouragement. The neutrality of the Portuguese

375 Edwardes, 49. 376 Gil Harris helped me to consider this possibility. 127 officials at Hormuz, on which Newbery had counted, had been found to have

changed into definite hostility; and no alteration of this attitude could be hoped

for as long as Philip of Spain was lord also of Portugal and there was open war

between him and Elizabeth. 377

Although Fitch’s travel narrative did not appear in print for another seven or eight years, war between England and Spain persisted until 1604 after James I had assumed the throne in 1603. Lacking a sense of immediacy, it then seems rather unlikely that Levant

Company principals or Fitch would suppress not only information on the Indian diamond market but also personal reflections on such a voyage.

Foster offers a more pragmatic reason for the insufficiencies, the gaps and the absences, of Fitch’s narrative. He surmises that Fitch maintained no journal, owing to the length of his journey and to the risk of such a document’s discovery by the Portuguese.378

Instead, possibly some years later, Fitch produced an account cobbled together from memory and, as it turns out, deeply indebted to the printed travels of Venetian merchant

Cesare Federici.379 In 1587, Federici published a relation of his “eighteene yeeres” spent

“in the East Indies” in order to detail those places “abounding with spices, drugs, and jewels” for the “profitable advertisement to all those that have a desire to make such a voyage.”380 Within one year, Thomas Hickocke had translated Federici’s Viaggio into

English and the work was published in London by Richard Jones and Edward White. 381

The account was apparently enticing enough for Hakluyt to include it in the second

377 Foster, England’s Quest , 106-07. 378 Ibid, 105-106. 379 Foster , Early Travels , 8. 380 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 365-66. 381 M.F. Strachan, “India,” Hakluyt Handbook , 208-13, esp. 211 128 edition of The Principal Navigations as “The voyage and trauell of M. Caesar Fredericke,

Merchant of Venice, into the East India, and beyond the Indies….” Whether due to the passage of time, Fitch’s worry over his abilities as a writer (as also suggested by Foster) or “pressure from Hakluyt,” the English merchant’s text maps closely onto the

Venetian’s, departing from it only where their paths literally diverged or where summary served Fitch’s purpose. 382 Moreover, Federici and Fitch’s narratives appear in close proximity in The Principal Navigations —a decision that, coupled with Hakluyt’s quiet sanctioning of Fitch’s “mild plagiarizing,” D.F. Lach pronounces as “the most important lapse in his [Hakluyt’s] editorial work.”383

M.F. Strachan well details the frustration that the reader of this portion of Hakluyt encounters:

Fitch had returned home safely, but his published account is a great disappointment.

He was the first Englishman to travel through central India, present himself at the

Great Moghul’s Court, sail down the Ganges to Bengal, visit Ceylon and Cochin, and

come home to tell his story. Yet that story is an almost slavish copy of Federici

whenever their routes coincide, and when he is covering new ground the narrative is

extraordinarily meagre. 384

Coming upon first Federici and then Fitch’s account in The Principal Navigations is indeed profoundly disorienting, sending the reader shuttling back and forth between the two texts. Leaving Venice in 1563, Federici travelled aboard the Gradaige toward

Cyprus, progressively journeying on to Tripoli, Aleppo, Birecik, Fellujiah, Babylon,

382 D.F. Lach, “The Far East,” Hakluyt Handbook , 214-222, esp. 219. 383 Ibid. 384 Strachan, “India,” 211. 129 Basra, Ormuz, and Goa. In Fitch, we find an identical navigation. That the two merchants follow the same path into the East should perhaps offer little surprise.

Presumably, until a consistently navigable sea route to India was coordinated, Western merchants trading in the Ottoman and Persian empires would have followed this established land route that took them to the western edge of the Persian Gulf from which they could sail for India. Instead, it is the consistent rigor with which Fitch replicates

Federici’s description of these places that the reader finds so jarring.

As but one example, we might compare the description of the Tower of Babel offered in both accounts. Of the once architectural wonder, Federici writes, “The Tower of Nimrod or Babel is situate on that side of Tygris that Arabia is, and in a very great plaine distant from Babylon seven or eight miles: which tower is ruinated on every side, and with the falling of it there is made a great mountaine: so that it hath no forme at all….”385 In turn, Fitch describes the ruin as follows: “The Tower of Babel is built on this side of the river Tygris, towards Arabia from the town about seven or eight miles, which tower is ruinated on all sides, and with the fall thereof hath made as it were a litle mountaine, so that it hath no shape at all….”386 The two passages nearly twin one another in syntax. Our eyes read over slight synonymous variations, and we might attribute excised details to Fitch’s (or Hakluyt’s) propensity for conciseness. Indeed, upon a first reading, the only substantial distinction seemingly exists in Fitch’s substitution of “litle” for “great” as the modifier for “mountaine.” The machinations behind this alteration initially remain uncertain. Did Fitch stumble into mimetic bumbling? Did he actually view the fallen tower and in that instance glimpse something different from Federici? Or

385 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 369. 386 Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, 467. 130 might this moment and others of iteration and difference indicate something else entirely?

Might it point to Fitch’s becoming citation, becoming aphorism, becoming diamond?

As Jeffrey Cohen writes in “Stories of Stone,” “Stone loves nothing more than story.”387 Cohen articulates the ways in which people have long sought to carve their own biographies into stone and the ways in which stone recounts histories that both precede and inevitably postdate the human.388 In the case of the diamond, perhaps stone’s love of story might be emended to a love of aphorism. The diamond loves nothing more than aphorism. Aphorisms about diamonds proliferate: a diamond in the rough ; diamonds are a girl’s best friend ; diamonds are forever . As Derrida posits in “Aphorism Countertime,” aphorism partakes in, develops out of, temporal particularity. 389 But inevitably, it also becomes unhinged from the exact historical setting of its articulation. This seeming ahistoricity perhaps grants the aphorism its aura of resplendent meaning, of truth.

Certainly, De Beers relied heavily upon aphorism’s atemporal promise when it hired the marketing firm of NW Ayers in 1947 to craft a scheme to boost diamond sales: for their money, De Beers got diamonds are forever .390 Coupling the diamond with forever enabled the aphorism to almost immediately erase the moment of its creation. This cultural oblivion worked in the favor of De Beers’ efforts to link the promise of marriage and diamond as long-standing tradition—provided the public did not, of course, forget

387 Cohen, “Stories of Stone,” 60. 388 Ibid. 389 Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime.” Acts of Literature ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge 1992): 414-433; Gil Harris first made me aware of my interest in diamonds and linguistic play. His incomparable Shakespeare and Literary Theory drew my attention to this particular work of Derrida; See Jonathan Gil Harris, “Deconstruction,” Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 42-57. 390 van der Gaag, 8. 131 the name of De Beers as the middleman matchmaker. The eternity of the diamond became a cipher for the supposed happily ever after of heteronormative marriage. 391

However, diamonds are forever was never really forever, never really a linguistic embodiment of truth, of signifier clasping signified: “4. An aphorism is exposure to contretemps. It exposes discourse—hands it over to contretemps. Literally—because it is abandoning a word…to its letter.”392 As the aphorism names, it also swerves. In the case of diamonds are forever , the countersign comes in the name of the diamond.

The first definition for diamond in the OED references both “a brilliant precious stone” and “adamant” “a substance of extreme hardness.” 393 Attending to diamond’s duality, Cohen writes in “The Sex Life of Stone,” “A diamond (the attractive gem) and adamant (the invincible substance of Satan’s chains, an unbreakable metal) are etymologically the same noun, so that each possesses qualities of the other.”394 An instantiation of Derridean différance, the diamond can never be coterminous with itself. 395 Far from being singular and stable, the diamond is always multiple—a thing of movement rather than frozen solidity. The diamond, Derrida might suggest, “doesn’t come all alone”: “Despite appearances, an aphorism never arrives by itself….”396 The diamond is always at least two. The OED offers a 1667 citation from Milton’s Paradise

Lost as a kind of memoriam for the last mingling of diamond and adamant: “On each

391 Cohen also notes the timelessness of this linguistic formulation and underscores the “heteronormativity” of the diamond.; See Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 10. 392 Derrida, “Aphorism,” 416. 393 "diamond, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/51960?rskey=2jmne4&result=1&isA dvanced=false (accessed May 13, 2014). 394 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 15. 395 I am grateful to Madhavi Menon for enabling me to better understand “instantiations,” to use her word, of différance. 396 Derrida, “Aphorism,” 416. 132 wing Uriel and Raphael his vaunting foe, Though huge, and in a Rock of Diamond Armd,

Vanquish'd.” Nevertheless, diamond as gem and diamond as adamant inevitably flicker back and forth in each naming, in each aphoristic use: “Although diamond and adamant ultimately become separate terms, different substances, each is forever haunted by its etymological doppelganger.”397 Moreover, as Cohen emphasizes their mutual root in the

Greek adamao (‘I tame, I subdue’) and the Latin ad-amant (‘loving deeply’) bespeaks a potent “lithic” agency and an “intimacy” with , beside , the human.398

In an interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida, referring to his work on aphorism in

Romeo and Juliet , describes the way in which a text speaks its historical context and simultaneously denies it, wanders away from it. He explains, “This has to do with the structure of a text, with what I will call, to cut corners, its iterability, which both puts down roots in the unity of a context and immediately opens this non-saturable context into a recontextualization.”399 Diamonds, of course, do this all of the time. Stardust in their structure, Indian earth on unpolished stone, diamonds deracinate. They emerge at the surface and enter new networks, different contexts. Gems saturated with lives, diamonds both cite their histories and occlude them. Perhaps then humans find aphorism the mode in which to speak of diamonds because aphorism is the state of the diamond’s existence. As Derrida reminds, “There is no pure singularity which affirms itself as such without instantly dividing itself, and so exiling itself.”400 Linschoten, William Leeds,

India—all suggest that diamonds do not traffic in exile or singularity: they are multiple

397 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 16. 398 Ibid, 15. 399 Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature , ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992): 33-75, esp. 63 400 Derrida, “Strange,” 65. 133 from the beginning, gem and metal all at once. And whether wittingly or no, Fitch, like the cut diamond, turns a multi-faceted thing—a liquid stone, bending language and light in a stream of movement.

Fitch exists as an iteration of Federici not only in his replication of portions of the

Venetian’s travels and narrative but also in his inevitable arcing away from them.

Synonyms flag not only continuous meaning but also a straying away into an underbrush of possibility. Summary does not merely provide the barebones information; it re-creates the structure of the original skeleton and shows those places in which the limbs were already out of joint. The Englishman tracks the steps and marks of the Venetian to Goa.

However, while Federici cuts across Southern India for the Bay of Bengal, Fitch flees northward and then crosses eastward into Bengal before drawing up some of the strands of Federici again in Burma and Malaya. Fitch thus follows the traces of Federici’s path and pen: “which tower is ruinated on every side,” “which tower is ruinated on all sides.”

Yet his mark veers. “Every” becomes “on all” and “side” becomes multiple, as does

Fitch himself. In so doing, he sides with the diamond, trauelling with it, beside (s) it, within it.

Admittedly, the detail that Federici offers about diamonds outmatches that of

Fitch. And one could easily read Federici’s prolixity and Fitch’s taciturnity as indicative of their relationship to the stone, of their level of “lithic intimacy.” Toward the end of his account, Federici gives a list correlating commodity and place—a generic feature common to mercantile travel narratives. When he arrives at diamonds, he names and differentiates between three types according to their geographical origination.

Stylistically parroting Federici, Fitch draws his relation to a close with a similar list. But

134 of the diamond, he writes only the following: “The diamants are found in divers places, as in Bisnagar, in Agra, in Delli, and in the Ilands of the Javas.”401 However, Fitch need not speak of diamonds or of their touch to begin to inhabit the space of the gem. A closeness—what Derrida might term the closeness of aphorism—emerges between them:

“…It [aphorism] has the form of the most loving affirmation—it is the chance of desire.402 ” The gap, the silence, between the diamond and Fitch opens up the possibility of play, the Derridean jeu , the errancy of desire . 403 Diamonds encourage citation and thus queer refractions. And Fitch pleasurably signs and countersigns again and again in the name of the diamond.

Diamonds thus tell a different kind of trauell narrative than the early modern merchants who would seek them. To allow the travel narratives of Western merchants after diamonds to be refracted through them, to be recounted by them, is to make space for experiences that do not fit the rubric of straightforward commodity acquisition and profit. To read with the diamond is to glimpse in the humans pulled after them, beside them, a fluidity of identity that can only be called a becoming diamond. 404 The merchant and the diamond oscillate across India: a diamond in the rough . Whether Fitch actually returned to England with diamonds in his pocket ultimately then is immaterial as he has become and continues to become the matter of the stone, a dazzling aphorism: diamond,

Federici, adamant, Fitch.

401 Hakluyt, Hakuyt Society, 504. 402 Derrida, “Aphorism,” 421. 403 Derrida, “Strange,” 64. 404 Becoming diamond is a play upon and extension of Cohen’s theorization of diamonds and becoming stone : “Diamonds can trigger a becoming-stone”; See Cohen, “The Sex Life of Stone, 19. 135 Chapter 3: Staging Diamond Economies of (Dis)Enchantment

The previous chapters have explored the persistence of the diamond’s materiality and the ways in which the material stone oriented and disoriented subjective desire, identity, and narrative in early modern lapidaries, artistic treatises, religious tracts, poetry, historiography, and travel narratives. In some instances, the authors of these works probably handled actual diamonds; in others, the wide-ranging early modern engagement with the matter of the gem shaped their writings. Yet in all of the works canvassed thus far, the reader, both early modern and modern, must imagine the outline of the diamond.

The generic requisites of early modern drama, the embodiment of the stage and the attendance of an audience, present a different possibility: the material presence of a diamond.

Early modern audiences very well might have seen diamonds wink from the stage. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda have dispelled “the myth of the bare

Shakespearean stage,” highlighting the integrity of spectacular and/or glamorous props to the Renaissance theater experience. 405 Harris convincingly argues that an intimacy between London companies and London theaters might explain “expensive goods” turned temporary stage properties in a kind of early modern “product placement.” 406 In their respective scholarship, Harris and Juana Green attend particularly to the possibility that members of the goldsmiths’ company might have furnished players’ material needs. 407

405 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, “Introduction: towards a materialist account of stage properties,” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama , eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-66, esp. 2-7. 406 Harris, Sick Economies , 178. 407 See Juana Green, “Properties of Marriage: Proprietary Conflict and the Calculus of Gender in Epicoene,” Staged Properties , 261-87 and Jonathan Gill Harris, “Properties of 136 Early modern goldsmiths would have been the individuals setting diamonds into the gold in which it was showcased until the 1660s when silver superseded it in the wake of advancements in diamond cutting technologies. 408 If goldsmiths indeed had a hand in productions, then in plays like Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Cymbeline and later in Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl , and Massinger’s The Renegado too, actual diamonds might have taken their place on the stage along with the human actors.

But even if a company had proved unable to secure the ‘real thing,’ then it still might have achieved credible diamond approximations. As Diana Scarisbrick notes, “Imitations of point- and table-cut diamonds were available in both crystal and paste.” 409 Thus, as early modern audiences gazed at the trasnsformative space of the stage, a glimpse of diamonds might have been part of what captured their attention.

This chapter takes up two plays from the 1590s that mention diamonds:

Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of

Venice . Interestingly, though, neither Jew of Malta nor Merchant of Venice deploys the diamond in a way that necessitates staging the stone. Rather, these plays invoke the diamond as either a future purchase (in Marlowe) or a material loss (in Shakespeare). In both plays, diamonds emerge during conversations about Jewish daughters, Abigail and

Jessica respectively. As a result, scholars have tended to treat the diamonds of Barabas and Shylock as entirely metaphorical glosses for Abigail and Jessica, disposing with any material residue of the gems. However, this evacuative reading underestimates the importance of the materiality of the diamond in these plays, overlooking the evocative

Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisinal Drama,” Staged Properties , 35-66; See also Harris, Sick Economies . 408 Scarisbrick. Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty , 353 409 Scarisbrick. Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection, 47 137 connection in early modern Europe and England between Jews and the gems. As I will discuss in greater detail below, throughout Renaissance Europe Jews participated heavily in the trafficking and cutting of diamonds. The extent of the presence of Jews living in

England at the close of the sixteenth century remains a point of critical debate, a point to which I will return. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that English merchants and goldsmiths would, at the least, probably have had dealings with continental Jewish diamond merchants and lapidaries. Some of the diamonds on English bodies then, within and without the English theaters in the 1590s, would have most likely born the traces of

Jewish work—within fifty years, nearly all of them would. 410

In the introduction to Learning to Curse , Stephen Greenblatt signals the power of the material realities that can underlie and indeed undergird language—even in the wake of the important impact that poststructuralism and deconstruction has had upon literary and cultural studies. He writes, “Our belief in language’s capacity for reference is part of our contract with the world; the contract may be playfully suspended or broken altogether, but no abrogation is without consequences, and there are circumstances where the abrogation is unacceptable.” 411 Greenblatt is here partly speaking about conceptions of genre and the ethics in a distinction between generic registers. But Michael Drakakis finds Greenblatt’s introductory words particularly resonant when paired with Greenblatt’s

410 Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade . Leicester: Leicester UP, 1978. Yogev argues for the role of primarily Sephardic or Marrano Jews in the centralization of the diamond trade in London—a centralization that began shortly after the Jewish “Resettlement” (84) in 1655 and was firmly established by the close of the seventeenth century. Yogev and Lenman diverge on the chronological conception of London’s emergence as a gem center. 411 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture , introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-15, esp.15. Drakakis’s citation of Greenblatt’s quote led me to Learning to Curse . 138 “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” an essay included in Learning to Curse . In this essay, Greenblatt powerfully critiques Marlowe and Marx’s respective use of “the Jew” as a “rhetorical strategy.” 412 Both Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Marx’s “On the Jewish

Question,” Greenblatt suggests, cast the Jew as the “tainted wether of” an entire “flock,” a culture irrespective of religion, diseased by capitalism. 413 For Greenblatt, this aesthetic and ideological dehistoricization produces a morally repugnant result, however laudable the critique of modes of capitalist production and consumption. In contrast to the radical sameness of The Jew of Malta ’s Barabas, Greenblatt posits the radical difference of The

Merchant of Venice’s Shylock—the latter also a “stereotype,” although underwritten by contemporary economic worries that might tell us something about early modern

European Christians (and their fears and fantasies) if not the historical actuality of their

Jewish counterparts. 414

The racism, both overt and covert, in The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of

Venice necessitates that those of us working with these plays engage seriously with

Greenblatt’s compelling appraisal. Yet I wonder if Greenblatt’s own articulation about

“language’s capacity for reference” might gesture toward a less binaristic reading across and within these two plays. Might an attention to materialism, not just to the cultural materialism as formulated through certain interpretations of Marxism but to the presence of matter in language, the presence of diamonds, give us a different purchase on

Jewishness in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays? The Jew of Malta and The Merchant

412 Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 291-307, esp. 293. 413 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , ed. John Drakakis (London: Arden, 2010), 4.1.113; Unless otherwise noted, all additional references to the play will be cited from this edition by act, scene, and line number. 414 Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 293-96, esp. 293. 139 of Venice are literary, aesthetic, creations. As such, they offer us representations of

Jewishness as imagined by English playwrights and not necessarily an account of lived experience. 415 However, Greenblatt would presumably acknowledge that part of the point of new historicism proves the transgressiveness of genre, the mutual constitiuveness of fiction and non-fiction, of cultural praxis and staged presentation. And part of the work of new materialism lies in flagging the object’s role in this transgression. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, objects carry their pasts, presents, and futures with them onto the stage. 416 They bring life, and the people living it. The diamonds in both The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice point to themselves and to the Jewish people who worked with them as something more than, or at least not only, “rhetorical device.” 417

They ask that we reorient our reading practices (broadly conceived) away from symbolic transcendence, and they complicate the binaries by which we tend to navigate identity in these particular works of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

However, they do not do so in the same way or to the same effect. I begin with

The Merchant of Venice —despite the play’s postdating of The Jew of Malta , which scholars grant as one of Shakespeare’s sources. 418 I do so because the divergent critical

415 Many thanks to Nedda Mehdizadeh for reminding me of this point. 416 See Magreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, ed., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ed., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jonathan Gil Harris’s work is particularly attune to the synchronic nature of objects’ temporality. His theorization in Untimely Matter has profoundly impacted my thinking about the diamond’s narratives and histories and the ways that they relate to the stone’s temporality; See Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2009). 417 Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx,” 292 418 Se, for example, Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 1:456. 140 response to the diamond and the turquoise in The Merchant of Venice discloses what is at stake in Shakespeare and Marlowe’s respective handling of diamonds. Shakespeare briefly toys with the diamond as a metaphor for Jessica only to reroute the stone immediately as a particular commodity with a very present past. Drawing upon Jane

Bennett’s theorization of material enchantment, I submit that Shylock’s diamond offers to

(re)enchant not only our interpretation of The Merchant of Venice but also our navigation of the relationship between commodity and matter. Yet, if Shakespeare’s diamond presents the possibility of enchantment, then the gem that Marlowe places before us extends a much darker entanglement of human and stone. In Marlowe, we find not

Shakespeare’s fleeting touch of almost metaphor, but an extended passage of metonymy between the body of Abigail and the body of the diamond. Marlowe here highlights the mercantile Barabras’s knowledge of diamond cutting and setting practices, but the uncomfortable proximity between the matter of the girl and the matter of the gem ultimately highlights a very different kind of labor. 419 And the crooked desires that map onto Abigail and the diamond, as well as other laboring bodies evoked, would seem to foreclose on the possibility of anything other than disenchantment.

“A diamond gone”: Diamond Recoveries in The Merchant of Venice 420

Michael Radford’s 2004 cinematic adaptation of The Merchant of Venice closes with an affecting image: as she stares out across the water, Jessica caresses a turquoise

419 Many thanks to Holly Dugan for drawing to my attention the importance of highlighting Barabas’s “knowledge” of the diamond trade and cutting. 420 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , 3.1.76. 141 ring bound around her middle finger. 421 This moment serves as the response to a scenic call earlier in the film in which Jessica slips the jewel from her hand, barter for a monkey—a vision conjured by Tubal for Shylock and the viewer in both Radford’s production and in Shakespeare’s play. A bittersweet instant of redemption, Radford’s ending affirms Jessica’s ties to the family and community that she left behind in Venice and underscores that her assimilation to Christian Belmont will only ever be partial. The hoop of gold and pale aqua stone surround Jessica with a past that would seem to dictate her future. As the film credits roll, the jewel haunts, in much the same way as the synagogue doors that shut upon Shylock and thus open for the audience this final tableau of ring and daughter.

Whatever one may feel about Radford’s visual embellishment of Shakespeare’s text with the concluding staging of the turquoise, one must admit that he follows a recent critical impulse in attending to Shylock’s ring. “It was my turquoise: I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.109-

11)—as indicated in the footnotes to Catherine Richardson’s work on rings in The

Merchant of Venice , the above lines, translated and re-envisioned by Radford, have directed scholarly attention. 422 Richardson writes, “These lines have struck critics and actors alike as especially, powerfully important.” 423 Robin Russin locates in Jessica’s exchange of the turquoise and Shylock’s subsequent lamentation “the moment of greatest

421 The Merchant of Venice , directed by Michael Radford (2004; New York: Sony Pictures Classics). 422 Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37-63. 423 Richardson, 43 142 pathos in the play.” 424 Stephen Greenblatt reads Shylock’s body as intimately inscribed within the turquoise ring: “It is as if the ring were something more than a piece of the

Jew’s wealth, as if it were a piece of his heart.” 425 For Richardson, the “power” of the above lines derives in part from “the simplicity of their language,” so distinct from the previous “rhetorical flourish” in Shylock’s exchange with Salanio and Salarino. 426 But, mostly, the words resonate because they bring before us an object capable of changing the way in which we read Jessica’s father: “The ring unsettles the dynamics between characters because it deals with a back-story, letting history briefly and powerfully intrude upon the present of the play’s action….” 427 The turquoise carries with it a narrative of affinity. And it therefore counterbalances and troubles the characterization of

“the stereotypical comic Jew” that Shakespeare also potentially calls forth. 428 Without

Shylock’s ring, The Merchant of Venice exists as a very different play.

There is, however, another gem with which Jessica supposedly absconds: a diamond. In reply to Tubal’s inability to inform on Jessica’s whereabouts, Shylock laments, “Why, there, there, there, there! A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt” (3.1.76-77). Yet aside from attention to the problematic conflation of the female body with the jeweled object, the diamond has not attracted the interest directed

424 Robin Russin, “The Triumph of the Golden Fleece: Women, Money, Religion, and Power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ,” Shofar 31.3 (2013): 115-30, esp. 117. 425 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 256-87, esp. 285. 426 Richardson, 43. As the Arden is my control text, I here follow Drakakis for the spelling of these particular Venetians instead of the spellings of “Solanio” and “Salarino” used by other editors of the play. 427 Richardson, 44 428 Richardson, 42. For a quite different interpretation of Shylock’s turquoise ring, see Drakakis, introduction to The Merchant of Venice, 1-159, esp. 79. 143 toward the turquoise. 429 This chapter does not offer a challenge to the integrity of the turquoise in artistic imagination or academic reflection. Rather, it wonders about a stone lost to Shylock and to our critical vantage. Why, it asks, has this particular diamond of

Shakespeare been so eclipsed? Why has Shylock’s “diamond gone” not been recovered in the scholarship mining The Merchant of Venice ?

By way of explanation, one might suggest for early modern culture an orientation toward diamonds distinct from ours. Shakespeare’s England, this argument would go, simply did not prize the gem as highly as do countries today, particularly the United

States. Scholars attend to Shylock’s turquoise because of the esteem in which

Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have held it. Outlining early modern conviction of the stone’s powers, Richardson pronounces “the turquoise the most valued of the semi- precious stones.” 430 Reading for the turquoise rather than for the diamond is reading then in a historically sensitive way. However, to arrive at this conclusion would be to deny the diamond’s seduction of Europe and the tangible impact that the stone’s allure had upon the West, specifically upon England’s culture and economy.

By the end of the 1300s, diamonds proved a major European import. 431 And as

Bruce Lenman notes in his work on the English jewel trade, “The sixteenth, and even more the seventeenth century, was to see a sharp rise both in the supply of and the demand for diamonds.” 432 In the decade before The Merchant of Venice’s initial staging between 1596 and 1598, England made the rather surreptitious and botched foray into the

Eastern gemstone circuit, detailed in Chapter Two, when John Newbery and Ralph Fitch,

429 On the merging of the female body and jewels, see Golz; Russin; and Slade. 430 Richardson, 38 431 van der Gaag, 16 432 Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade,” 86-99, esp. 90. 144 members of the recently formed Turkey Company, accompanied by jeweler William

Leeds and painter James Story, journeyed into India to source diamonds and other stones. 433 Of this quartet, only Fitch saw England again. 434 But the decades following the play’s first performance granted a different story, with London emerging as “a major centre of the international gem trade” as a result of the burgeoning English East India

Company and a newly unified Britain, as previously mentioned. 435 Lenman suggests that while English East India Company merchants often bought gemstones as trade for

Moluccan spices, diamonds presented an exception: “Diamonds were purchased primarily for direct importation into England.” 436 Thus, in many respects, The Merchant of Venice takes the stage at a unique time in the history of England and the diamond. It teeters between an impotent desire for English acquisition of diamonds and the possibility of a realized future of an island awash in stones by its own means.

And yet, the blue shadow of Shylock’s turquoise continues to obscure the clarity of Shylock’s diamond. How are we to account for this critical preference? The answer would seem to lie in capitalism. For the many scholars who largely pass over the diamond, and for the few who do not, the disenchantment of capitalism appears to have dulled the diamond’s shine in The Merchant of Venice . Bankrupt of the turquoise’s

433 Drakakis narrows the window of The Merchant of Venice’s inaugural performance to “between autumn 1596 and July 1598.” Drakakis, The Merchant of Venice , introduction, 31. On the Turkey Company expedition, see William Foster, Early Travels in India ; Foster, England’s Quest . 1583-1619 (Delhi: S. Chand, 1968); William Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1933); For a discussion of the voyage of Newbery, Fitch, Leeds, and Story (as well as citations), please see Chapter 2. 434 Parts of the wording in this brief mention of Fitch derive from a paper that I delivered, entitled “Re-Orienting the Diamond: India, the Transnational Jewel Trade, and the Early Modern Theater,” at a George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute Seminar (Washington, DC) in October of 2011. 435 Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade,” 95. 436 Bruce P. Lenman, “The East India Company,” 97-109, esp. 102. 145 symbolic capital, the diamond’s status as commodity would appear to render it an empty vehicle of investment and exchange. In her exposition of the turquoise, Richardson briefly invokes “Shylock’s diamond” as a point of comparison: “Precise value, like the

2,000 ducats (or around £180,000) which Shylock’s diamond cost when he bought it in

Frankfurt, is replaced by history, by a provenance which explains its ‘sentimental value.’” 437 Dispossessed of history and possessed only of a quantifiable monetary value, the diamond is a mere commodity: “All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished.” 438

Unlike the turquoise, the commodified diamond would seem to tell us nothing of

Shylock, of his past. It speaks only to the present possibility of exchange value. As Peter

Holland writes, “The meaning of the loss of diamond [sic] may be precisely and adequately expressed by its cost; its purchase price of two thousand ducats may be all we need to know about it.” 439

Indeed, it is Jessica’s conversion of her mother’s ring into a money-form that most troubles critics. Bruce Boehrer well articulates this worry:

…Jessica’s purchase of a pet monkey does not simply represent a

preference for symbolic over economic capital. It also repudiates a

particular symbolic investment that Shylock holds dear, for it transforms

the Jew’s turquoise ring, the endearing emblem of his dead wife’s love,

437 Richardson, 44 438 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. I (New York: Penguin, 1990), 128. 439 Peter D. Holland, “ The Merchant of Venice and the Value of Money,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 60 (2001): 13-30, esp. 26. 146 into a purely economic commodity, significant only with respect to its

exchange value. 440

And this movement of the turquoise from material symbol to commodity aligns it with the diamond, as Lars Engle observes. Engle writes:

Shylock lost two rings with Jessica, one a diamond that cost him two

thousand ducats at Frankfurt, the other the turquoise Leah gave him when

he was a bachelor, which Jessica, in an appalling parody of her mother's

gesture, exchanges for a monkey: the error, then, involved in using

something which has symbolic value for its ex-change value is connected

with rings in the play before the final scene 441

One might quibble with Engle’s assertion of the diamond as a ring: it seems more likely that Shylock would have purchased a loose stone, a point to which I will return.

Nevertheless, Engle elegantly distills the reader’s affective response to both the turquoise and the diamond. The reader recoils from the transformation of the turquoise into a commodity because, unlike the diamond, it was never supposed to be one. “…[A] ring…for a monkey”—a category confusion about which one can lament and write. An object with an enchanted biography, the turquoise ring might damn Jessica but it “saves

Shylock.” 442 Deprived of poetry and story, the diamond fails to offer such a reparative resonance and the understandable appeal that goes with it.

440 Bruce Boehrer, “Shylock and the Rise of the Household Pet: Thinking Social Exclusion in The Merchant of Venice ,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50.2 (1999):152-70, esp.157-58.

441 Lars Engle, “‘Thrift as Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice ,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37.1 (1986): 20-37, esp. 33. 442 Richardson, 42. 147 In her critique of Weberian disenchantment, Jane Bennett glosses enchantment as a powerful “somatic” response to the material world, be it literal or literary. 443 This reaction need not be one of unalloyed pleasure. Bennett writes, “Enchantment consists of a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain….” 444 The creativity of the popular and critical response to Shylock’s turquoise suggests that the ring elicits the “joy and disturbance” that Bennett identifies with enchantment. Indeed, in this sense, the affective “bond” (to use Richardson’s term) between reader/viewer and the turquoise acknowledges a kind of agency for the stone—an agency not entirely dissimilar from the vitality that early moderns would have granted it. 445 In describing Shylock’s immediate identification of the turquoise as the traded jewel, Richardson writes, “His mind is drawn to the ring in a way suggestive of the magical properties of connection which the turquoise held.” 446 Can the diamond “draw” the “minds” of the characters in the play and those of us looking in on them in the same way? What would it take to re- enchant the commodified diamond in The Merchant of Venice ?

One response would be to transport the diamond out of its commodity form, to recuperate its state prior to its entry into a system of exchange. In several works, Peter

Stallybrass has elegantly articulated the “materials of memory” that objects carry with

443 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 5. 444 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life , 111. 445 Richardson, 44. For Bennett, enchantment results as a material vibrancy not necessarily predicated upon past association between subject and object. “Vibrancy” proves a keyword for Bennett’s recent scholarship: see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 446 Richardson, 41. 148 them, perhaps nowhere more cogently than in his essay on Marx’s overcoat. 447 In

“Marx’s Coat,” Stallybrass distinguishes between the commodity’s dematerialized and thus empty form and the material object in which is fossilized “history, memory, and desire.” 448 He traces the movement of Marx’s own coat between his body and the pawnshop, between an item in which is woven Marx’s identity and a dehistoricized exchange value. Stallybrass writes, “…the wrinkles in the elbows of a jacket or a sleeve…memorized the interaction, the mutual constitution, of person and thing. But from the perspective of commercial exchange, every wrinkle or ‘memory’ was a devaluation of the commodity.” 449 Extant in the endless present of exchange, commodities have no use for “wrinkles in time”. 450 Re-enchantment thus translates as a backward glance to an object’s past entirely discrete from the commodity circuit.

Commodities do not truck with this kind of enchantment, so the argument goes. Creatures of the now, commodities deny the kind of histories of affinity between subject and object that have so moved readers of Shylock’s turquoise.

On the one hand, the diamond, as written about by Engle, Holland, and

Richardson, refuses a sensuous connection to the human. It exists as an abstracted exchange-value. 451 No longer an object of matter or labor, a thing with a use-value as

447 The phrase “materials of memory” appears most prominently in the title of the edited collection Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory ; however, Stallybrass theorizes the concept across many of his works. See Magrete de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture ; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory ; and Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces , ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183-207. 448 Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” Border Fetishisms , 186. 449 Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” Border Fetishisms , 196. 450 I am here paraphrasing from the title of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time . 451 Marx, Capital , 127. 149 defined by Marx, the diamond enters the play as a worth, a cost, “two thousand ducats” for which Shylock is now in the hole. 452 In this interpretation, unsentimental and generalized, cold cash—which so many critics read as the lubrication of the play’s machinery—serves as the signified for the sign of the diamond. To attend to the possibilities of enchantment by the diamond, an affective engagement with the gem, would be to fall into the lure of commodity fetishism. Of such fetishism, Marx writes, “It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this.” 453 Thus, the diamond’s vivification would prove no more than an empty promise of sociability with a zombie: a thing bereft of carbon, human or diamond.

On the other hand, through metaphor, Shylock’s diamond would seem to introduce a disquieting proximity to the human body. The diamond emerges within the context of a conversation, at least in part, about efforts to track Jessica. Tubal reports to

Shylock, “I often came where I did hear of her, but cannot find her” (3.1.74-75). In response to which Shylock delivers the lines cited above, “Why, there, there, there, there.

A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt.” In Shylock’s retort, the

“her” of Tubal’s Jessica glosses, at least at first, as “diamond.” If with the turquoise,

Jessica introduces a category confusion between a thing valued in love and a thing valued for exchange, then here she would seem to embody that category confusion as human turned marketable object. One could argue, as many scholars have, that in the space of

Shakespeare’s play women live alongside other goods for sale, much as they did in

452 Marx, Capital , 133. 453 Marx, Capital ,165 150 certain circles in the world beyond the stage. Karen Newman notes that “in early modern

England…marriage, among the elite at least, was primarily a commercial transaction…Daughters were pawns in the political and social maneuvers of their families, particularly their male kin.” 454 Jessica as figurative diamond circulates within this system—“precious,” (3.1.79), desirable, and ultimately valuable. The weight of the diamond’s symbolism, what David Golz terms “an array of cultural implications,” shifts to Jessica. Thus, a bodily connection, however disturbing, between the girl and the jewel partakes of the somatic transience of metaphor. Her body displaces not the stone, but the discursive cultural construction of the stone. 455

These are compelling arguments, not without merit or a certain amount of textual support drawn from elsewhere in the play. They foreclose on the possibility of a diamond enchanted, of an emotional and corporeal response to the diamond from the reader/viewer powerful enough to shift our thinking about Shylock and the play in which he exists. But in both a certain kind of Marxist and/or feminist interpretation, the diamond itself recedes into the background. It becomes a materially emptied symbol for something else: a marker of exchange value, a crystallized form of profitable femininity. To an extent, a diamond is a culturally determined thing, but it is also a determinant of culture. To map

Shylock’s diamond into these symbolic frameworks risks overlooking the ways in which the gem orients us to new horizons of understanding the character of Shylock and the

454 Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice , Shakespeare Quarterly 38.1 (1987): 19-33, esp. 23. 455 For Russin, the metaphor is seemingly so transparent that in a section of her work on The Merchant of Venice entitled “Jessica and the Diamond Lost” she does not even address the lines in which Shylock appears to conflate not his “daughter” and his “ducats” (2.8.15) but his daughter and his diamond. See Russin, “Golden Fleece,” esp. 124-26.

151 greater stakes of The Merchant of Venice . It risks overlooking the ways, other than symbolism, in which an early modern theatergoer or reader might have approached

Shylock’s diamond. At least at this juncture in the play, these interpretations can exist only through an abbreviated reading practice. Put differently, the above takes on the diamond work only if there is a period after either “ducats” or “gone”: “A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats.” / “A diamond gone.” However, if we read Shylock’s sentence all the way through, we find a telling prepositional clause at its end: “A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt ” (emphasis mine). “In Frankfurt”

Suddenly, the commodified diamond has a history. And, as it turns out, it has this history without ceasing to be a thing of commercial exchange. In fact, it has a history because of it.

Many modern editors of The Merchant of Venice link Frankfurt to the gem trade.

For example, in her gloss for “Frankfurt” in the New Cambridge edition of the play, M.

M. Mahood writes “The scene of a famous jewellery fair every September.” 456 In the

Arden edition of the play, John Drakakais does not mention a specific correlation between Frankfurt and jewels, instead naming Frankfurt “a centre for commercial and monetary transaction,” but he does direct the reader to Coryats Crudities (1611), Thomas

Coryate’s account of his European travels. 457 In the Crudities , Coryat details his visit to the “Autumnall Mart” in Frankfurt. Amidst a display of “riches…most infinite,” Coryat

456 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , ed. M.M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.1.67n. In the Oxford edition of the play, Jay Halio’s note on the line reads: “Site of a famous jewellery fair.” See William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3.1.80n. And the Norton edition of the play offers the following: “Site of a jewel market.” See The Merchant of Venice , The Norton Shakespeare , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008), 3.1.72n. 457 [Thomas Coryat], Coryats Crudities (London, 1611) 152 finds himself particularly captured by the wares of the goldsmiths: “The riches I obserued at this Mart were most infinite, especially in one place called Under Den Koemer, where the Goldsmithes kept their shoppes, which made the most glorious shew that euer I saw in my life….” 458 To the members of European goldsmith guilds went the privilege of setting cut diamonds and other stones into jewelry—although, as Diana Scarisbrick notes, the turn of the seventeenth century brought a close to “the golden age of the goldsmith” as larger and more elegantly cut gems superseded intricate enamel design and metalwork. 459 But from where did the Frankfurt goldsmiths acquire diamonds? And who did the cutting of the stones?

Barred from guild participation in many cities across Europe, early modern Jews located an occupational niche in the diamond cutting and trade industry. Religious persecution and forced expulsion throughout the early modern period initiated Jewish migration to cities like Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, as well as parts of the Ottoman

Empire. Of these, Antwerp and Amsterdam are most closely associated with Jewish trade and cutting networks in European historiography. It is interesting to note, though, and to speculate as to the Jewish role in the Venetian diamond market. The Venetian mercantile presence in the Levant and the East has been well documented: “From the fifteenth century onwards Venice established itself as a dominant maritime power whose access to

Turkey and to the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean contributed to its reputation as a multicultural republic.” 460 And Scarisbrick underscores the role of the Venetians

458 Coryate, Coryats Crudities , 564. 459 Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty , 311. Thus, diamonds no longer ornamented the craft of the goldsmith, but rather the goldsmith’s work ornamented the stone. 460 Drakakis, Merchant of Venice , 3 153 specifically in the context of jewel trafficking during the period, writing “Brilliant traders, the Venetians took English wool to the East and returned home with gems for sale in Europe.” 461 For years, Venice would dominate the diamond trade. 462 Although

George Harlow, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, does not explicitly link Jews with diamond cutting in the city, he does place “[t]he earliest evidence of diamond cutting, dating to soon after 1330” in Venice. 463 Is it possible then that

Levantine Jews living in Venice drew upon contacts in the region to import diamonds across established land routes? 464 Did Venetian Jews participate in the cutting of these stones once they reached Europe? Perhaps. However, by the time of The Merchant of

Venice’s staging, Lisbon, through the Portuguese (and thus Spanish) footing in India, had begun to surpass Venice, thus potentially explaining why Shylock would need to travel beyond Venice to acquire a diamond. 465 Through ties to their Spanish and Portuguese origins, Sephardic communities in Antwerp, and eventually Amsterdam following the

Dutch “blockade of Antwerp” in 1595, became synonymous with diamond trade and cutting. 466

But what of Frankfurt? At the close of the seventeenth century, the Jewish community in Frankfurt proved well established and growing. Protected by Charles V due to “political expediency,” the Frankfurt Jewish community had not witnessed the

461 Diana Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , 39. 462 Van der Gaag 16. 463 Harlow, “Following the History of Diamonds,” The Nature of Diamonds , 131. 464 Jonathan Israel notes that in Venice the Jewish community was segmented “into three ‘nations’”: the “‘Ponentine,” the “‘Levantine’” and the “‘German.’” See Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 161. 465 See Lenman, “The East India Company,” 100; Lenman, “England, the International Gem Trade,” 90; Van der Gaag, 16; Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery , 39. 466 Israel, European Jewry , 42, 51-52 Israel, 51-52. 154 disruption visited upon other Jewish populations in Europe in the hundred years spanning from 1470 through 1570. 467 As Jonathan Israel details, the population of Frankfurt Jews remained small and relatively stable in the middle of the sixteenth century, yet in 1570 this began to change. He writes, “It was, in fact, only in the 1570s that this community began to grow rapidly out of all proportion to the overall expansion of the city. As in

Prague, this acceleration was caused by a sudden relaxation of previous restrictions leading to a dramatic broadening in the scope of Jewish economic activity, particularly in general commerce.” 468 Ashkenazi Jews (of eastern European descent), as opposed to

Sephardi Jews (with ties to the Iberian peninsula) with whom historians so frequently link early modern diamonds, predominated in Frankfurt. 469 But, according to Israel, the

Ashkenazi Jews of Frankfurt also dealt in diamonds, although the cutting of the stones remained the province of Antwerp and Amsterdam. 470 Moreover, Israel hypothesizes that

Frankfurt might have denied residency to “a group of Venetian Portuguese Jews” in 1609 in a move of economic protectionism. He writes, “…in the case of Frankfurt the transit trade overland, from the Low Countries to Italy, was shrinking (owing to the success of

Dutch shipping) but well established, so that admitting Venetian Portuguese [Jews] would have harmed local merchants.” 471

A rooted and notable Jewish community potentially dealing in diamonds in a city with trade ties to “the Low Countries” and “Italy.” Diamond ghosts winking out of a

Venetian past and haunting a changing present. In a savvy re-reading of Marx, framed in

467 Israel, European Jewry , 13, 12 468 Israel, European Jewry , 34 469 Israel, European Jewry , 147 470 Israel, European Jewry , 150 471 Israel, European Jewry , 147 155 the terms of queer theory and phenomenology, Sara Ahmed reminds us that commodities exist devoid of a past only if we choose to participate in the oblivion of commodity fetishism. She writes, “So it [the object] becomes that which we have presented to us, only if we forget how it arrived, as a history that involves multiple forms of contact between others.” 472 What Shylock’s commodified diamond does is remind us of how it arrived, and it announces with its own arrival the company of others. The diamond refracts through it Jewish networks of trade and community, bringing these bodies into the pages of Shakespeare’s play and onto the space of his stage. It bespeaks the hands through which it passed, and the intricacies and intimacies of the webs of touch that many of the Christians in the play would prefer to deride and/or to overlook. In a work that would seem to ghettoize a few Jewish figures amidst a heavily Christian cast of characters, Shylock’s diamond introduces a people—a people who underwrite a mercantile economy both inside and outside of the play not only through their funding of it but also through their participation in it.

Shylock’s possible involvement in the Jewish diamond trade invites us then to look anew at the trial scene, specifically at Portia as Balthazar’s opening salvo: “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” (4.1.170). Provocateurs, these words have initiated much barbed scholarly debate because they seem to hold out an interpretive

Rosetta stone to the play. Portia delivers the lines with a sardonic mirth, and The

Merchant of Venice descends into an anti-semetic doggerel that leaves one disappointed in Shakespeare and his contemporary audience. In other words, neither Shakespeare nor theatergoers would ever confuse “the Jew” for “the merchant.” To an extent, this is the

472 Ahmed, 41-42. 156 reading upon which Greenblatt settles. Of Belmont, Greenblatt writes, “Shylock is the antithesis of this world, as he is of the Christian mercantilism of Venice.” 473 But Portia poses the question without irony, and it balances in a space of possibility. The audience, both in the courtroom and the theater, take Portia’s question seriously, not necessarily because Shylock is a merchant but because the play refuses easy distinctions. While

Drakakis insists upon Shylock as “a composite,” both vilified stock character and “an individualized being,” he cedes Portia’s question to the former formulation, reading in her query an affirmation of radical and recognizable difference based upon a racist premise. Comparing Shakespeare’s work to that of Marlowe, Drakakis writes,

“Marlowe’s play conflates ‘Jew’ and ‘merchant,’ whereas Shakespeare maintains a distinction between them, notwithstanding the apparent confusion that some critics have ascribed to Portia’s question about identities….” 474 René Girard’s work on The Merchant of Venice in A Theater of Envy would seem to participate, at least in part, in this

“apparent confusion.” Ultimately, Girard identifies a co-presence in the play of an insistence upon the difference of Christian and Jew and an assertion of their sameness.

Yet he reads in Portia’s query (and its possible staging) a gesturing toward the latter—in a way, we might add, that upends the Duke’s question to the disguised Portia: “Are you acquainted with the difference / That holds this present question in the court?” (emphasis mine, 4.1.167-68). Girard writes, “We have an allusion to this process of undifferentiation, I believe, in a well-known line of this play. When Portia enters the court she asks, ‘Which is the merchant here and which is the Jew?’…he [Shakespeare]

473 Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx,” 295. 474 Drakakis, Merchant of Venice , 25, 24 157 went as far as he could, I believe, here and elsewhere to question the reality of a difference he himself, of course, had first introduced into his play.” 475

In the wake of the critical crux exemplified in Drakakis’s and Girard’s respective readings of the play, the diamond testifies to a third possibility: that “merchant” and

“Jew” were not mutually exclusive terms in the early modern period, even in England.

Scholars disagree as to the historical reality of Jewish life in England from the time of the

Expulsion in 1290 until the resettlement under Cromwell in 1656. 476 While Stephen

Greenblatt acknowledges “a small population” in London, he largely meditates upon the absence of Jews from Elizabethan England. For Greenblatt, a cultural pastiche of intolerant fantasy populated this absence. Narrative stilled whatever small ripple of lived contribution the diminished Jewish community might have actually made to Elizabethan life: “…stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated…There were Jewish fables and

Jewish jokes and Jewish nightmares.” 477 James Shapiro also investigates “the anxieties produced by the idea of the Jew” in early modern England, but he challenges the academic saw that “there were no Jews in England,” detailing the nature of a limited but entrenched Jewish community that counted merchants among it. 478 Whether or not these

Jewish merchants dealt in diamonds requires further investigation. But their place in

London points outward to European mercantile networks and asks us to consider the

475 René Girard, “To Entrap the Wisest: Sacrificial Ambivalence in The Merchant of Venice and Richard III ,” A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 243-55, esp. 246-47. 476 For the above dates and their potential problems, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 43-88. 477 Greenblatt, Will in the World , 258 478 Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews , 76, 44, 72. Shapiro also notes the various Jews who traveled to London, thus also signaling the ways in which the “Christian” English might have come into contact with Jews regardless of the status of Jewishness in the country (75). 158 ways in which Jews in the period existed as more than English fairytale figures. In all likelihood, London merchants and vendors interested in pushing diamonds in England at the close of the seventeenth century would have made recourse to Jewish merchants and

Jewish diamond cutters on the Continent. Thus, some among the English would have

“actually laid eyes on” a Jew, while others on the island would touch Jewish hands, wittingly or not, when cradling a diamond accessory. 479

The diamond thus bears witness in the trial scene—a material response to Portia’s question. It interrogates a reading that emphasizes the space “between merchant adventurer and Jew.” 480 But through the diamond’s signaling of Jewish mercantilism, it also puts pressure on an interpretation that glosses “the merchant” of Portia’s question as

“Antonio” or “Christian,” in an effort to demonstrate the play’s leveling impulses. The diamond refuses total difference and total sameness. “Antonio and old Shylock, both stand forth” (4.1.171) in a shared space created by diamond commodities. The play is not then about, or not solely about, Christian and Jew, merchant and usurer, and the rhetorical contingency of such dichotomies. Rather, it is about the multi-faceted nature of identity and about the lived contingency enabled by networks of human and diamond. The beauty of Shylock’s diamond cannot dispel the ugliness of what follows, nor can its elegance entirely displace the nasty caricatures of Jews snaking through Shakespeare’s play and country. Yet, even as Jewishness appears to be excised from the play’s conclusion with

Jessica and Shylock’s respective conversions, the diamond insists upon a very real Jewish mercantile presence—a presence not necessarily overlooked by English, Renaissance theatergoers ornamented with the desirable Indian stone.

479 Greenblatt, Will in the World , 259 480 Drakakis, The Merchant of Venice , 21 159 As scholars, we have forgotten the history of the diamond’s “arrival,” to use

Ahmed’s term—an oversight that perhaps says more about us than it does about the diamond in Shakespeare’s play. But Shylock’s commodifed diamond offers to reorient our reading practices, to enchant us. The diamond does not subsist in the synchronic temporality of its current exchange value. It came from somewhere, and it moved through somewhere, delivering a past whose connectivity is the reality of Shakespeare’s present and the possibility of our future engagement with his text. The diamond incorporates us into the network that shines through it—a network of Jewish diamond cutters and merchants, early modern buyers and sellers, and an English playwright for whom the diamond wasn’t quite “gone” nor the Jewish people linked to it. Thus, like the turquoise, the diamond commodity in The Merchant of Venice holds out the possibility of an enchantment subtended by an affective response: “a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain.” 481 And the new terrain onto which it tosses us is the expanse that the diamond’s recovery in scholarship opens up for how we read Shakespeare’s plays and the country in which they were written and for how we reflect on capitalism today.

“Tush, man, we talked of diamonds, not of Abigail ”: Diamond B(aw)dies in The Jew of

Malta 482

Roughly four years earlier, Marlowe too brought a diamond into a play by way of a Jewish father and Jewish daughter. Yet, while Shakespeare almost immediately turns

481 Bennett, The Enchantment , 111, previously cited. 482 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta , ed. N.W. Bawcut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 2.3.154; Emphasis editor’s. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the body of the text. 160 from a comparative coupling of daughter and diamond, Marlowe pivots toward it. In

Marlowe, the missing diamond that Shakespeare contracts into two lines exists as a gem available for future purchase, with the discussion of it (and of Abigail) spreading across several lines and becoming a later point of return. In Act Two, Scene Three of The Jew of

Malta , Lodowick, the Govenor’s son, encounters Barabas when out walking and inquires as to whether the merchant can secure a diamond for him: “Well, Barabas, canst help me to a diamond?” (2.3.49). Barabas’s well-developed trade connections and his own store of gems, highlighted in the opening counting house soliloquy, testify to the merchant’s ability to garner a diamond for the governor’s son.483 And indeed, though lamenting the loss of the majority of his diamonds to the Governor’s confiscation of his goods, Barabas confesses that one stone remains worthy of Lodowick’s attention: “O, sir, your father had my diamonds. / Yet I have one left that will serve your turn” (2.3.51). Of course, in the aside with which Barabas follows this line, he makes clear what the reader has already presumed from Lodowick’s pronounced desire to “…so insinuate / that I may have a sight of Abigail” (2.3.33-34): the diamond of which they speak is Barabas’s daughter. To the audience or to the air, Barabas whispers, “ I mean my daughter—but e’er he shall have her / I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood ” (emphasis editor’s, 2.3.52-53). Ignorant of the risk entailed in bargaining for Barabas’s “diamond,” the lascivious Lodowick proceeds with an inquiry as to the “gem’s” material merits.

Barabas directly and Lodowick winkingly seem to sanction a metaphorical reading of the lines that follow, giving license to an interpretation that replaces the

483 In the preceding section in this chapter on The Merchant of Venice , I write at length about the role of Jews in early modern diamond trading and cutting. Thus, I will not repeat that argument here. 161 specific matter of the diamond with the most intimate parts of Abigail’s body. The bawdiness that those body parts can offer provides the sexual puns that would seem to fuel the scene. For example, directly before concluding their diamond dealings with a discussion of “price” (2.3.65), Lodowick queries Barabas about the advantage to which the diamond “shows…by night” (2.3.63). Barabas’s initial response partakes of a kind of poetic stock talk about diamond jewels and women: “Outshines Cynthia’s rays:” (2.3.63).

He then adds (and one can imagine the elbow nudge here), “You’ll like it better far o’nights than days” (2.3.64). 484 In other words, Abigail can give a gem of a performance in bed, a performance that would eclipse the very moon. By this point in the men’s conversation, the material diamond would seem to have receded far into the background.

It serves as a public vehicle of sale for a private retailing of Abigail. A thing of conveyance, this diamond denotes metaphor: “A figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable….” 485

Indeed, the stone as metaphorical shorthand for woman as possession proves the reading that many critics have felt empowered to offer. David Golz draws upon Barabas’s martialing of “Cynthia’s rays” to make this argument. He writes, “The language of the scene puts Abigail in the position of goods to be exchanged among men, and she is specifically marked as lustrous sexual goods and referred to impersonally as “it.” Barabas uses his sparkling daughter, who ‘outshines Cynthia’s rays’ (63), to lure Lodowick to his

484 I here concur Bawcutt’s determintation that although this line is that although marked as aside in the 1633 edition of the play, it is more likely direct speech. 485 "metaphor, n.". OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/117328?redirectedFrom=metaphor (accessed February 25, 2014); my emphasis. 162 house….” 486 Similarly, Carol Slade suggests Abigail as her father’s “metaphoric diamond,” noting “Barabas can let his diamonds go, but he will not surrender his daughter to a Christian husband.” 487 And to an extent, the text authorizes the elision of metaphor, evidenced toward the close of Act 2 when Lodowick visits Barabas and

Abigail at home:

Lod. This is thy diamond; tell me, shall I have it?

Bar. Win it, and wear it; it is yet unsoiled. (2.3.294-95)

The material diamond ring translates into a woman owned and worn, symbolically and sexually—the guardianship of Nerissa’s ring that Gratiano promises at the close of

Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice .488

However, the interest in what some might call the extended metaphor between the diamond and Abigail derives from the specificity of the comparison. You actually have to know something about the practice of early modern diamond cutting and setting to get most of the “inside jokes” that Barabas and Lodowick and their early modern audience would have shared. “What sparkle does it give without a foil?” (2.3.56), Lodowick asks.

Lodowick’s “foil” refers to foiling, a gem setting technique that enabled goldsmiths to obscure flaws and boost radiance. As Diana Scarisbrick explains, foiling entailed positioning a “paper-thin sheet of metal” between the bottom of the gem and the setting. 489 But foiling proved a bit trickier with the diamond than with colored stones.

Scarisbrick writes, “Whereas this was a straightforward technique for colored gems, diamonds presented more of a challenge since each required a foil individually created

486 Golz, 172-73. 487 Slade, “The Value of Diamonds in English Literature,” Nature of Diamonds , 172-73 488 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , Drakakis, 5.1.306-07. 489 Scarisbrick, Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection, 217. 163 for its own particular lustre or water. Some foils were tinted hard, some soft, some dark, some light. Black was best, enhancing a thousandfold the most beautiful and limpid stones.” 490 As Scarisbrick affirms, only the most pristine diamonds “could be set a jour without foil.” 491 Thus, when Barabas responds to Lodowick’s query with the assertion that “The diamond that I talk of ne’er was foiled” (2.3.56), he speaks to the beauty of both the stone and the girl. The purity of the gem maps onto the unsullied state of the virginal Abigail, rendered explicit by Barabas’s following aside: “ But when he touches it, it will be foiled ” (emphasis editor’s, 2.3.58). The father’s remark hinges upon the rhyming play of foiled and soiled . With Lodowick’s touch, Abigail becomes a flawed diamond, damaged goods.

Learning that the diamond of Abigail “sparkles bright and faire” (2.3.59),

Lodowick questions Barabas as to the jewel’s shape. “Is it square or pointed? Pray let me know” (2.3.60), he asks. Here Lodowick references the style of the diamond’s cut. In nature, diamonds primarily exist as octahedrons: a shape resembling two pyramids, one upright and the other inverted, joined at their bases. as previously noted. In the discourse of early modern gem cutting, “pointed” diamonds persist in the octahedron shape, polished for regularity and shine. Point cut diamonds provided the pleasure of early modern diamond writing discussed in Chapter One. “[S]quare” indicates a style known as a table cut in which the natural pyramid point of the diamond is sliced off, forming a flat surface akin to that of a table. Gem specialist Benjamin Zucker posits the table cut as a technological advance upon the point cut: “The successor to the point was the table

490 Ibid, 44; Scarisbrick attributes to the success of black foils the presence of so many black diamonds in the paintings from the 1500 and 1600s (44). 491 Ibid, 44. 164 cut…Optically, the table cut greatly increased the amount of light returned to the eye, imparting brilliance and fire.” 492 Zucker’s telos implies the table cut’s greater desirability.

Yet Barabas proclaims to Lodowick’s delight that his diamond is “Pointed” (2.3.61).

How the “Pointed” diamond corresponds to Abigail’s body poses no small difficulty of interpretation. One could imagine a “Pointed” Abigail as a woman of such natural loveliness that she needs little emendation to amplify her “brilliance and fire,” to deploy

Zucker’s words. However, in the shifting, sexualized language of Lodowick and Barabas, the modifier of “Pointed” most likely gestures towards a bosom for Abigail more ample than not. Barabas then transforms the word “Pointed” again, exhaling that Abigail is

“not ” “Pointed,” meaning “directed” or “aimed,” “ for ” Lodowick (emphasis editor’s,

2.3.61). 493

In glossing the rhetorician Quintilian’s treatment of metaphor, Madhavi Menon cogently writes, “Metaphor is the ‘commonest…of tropes’ because it allows us instant access to a register of comparisons….” 494 In the examples above, the diamond and

Abigail partly satellite within metaphor’s “register of comparisons.” Yet as Menon articulates, metaphor pledges an equation in which A yields to B: “Despite being a trope, metaphor is traditionally seen not only as a manageable trope, but also as a trope that helps manage or govern speech; metaphor is fully present unto itself and ensures that language, too, is fully present and accountable for itself.” 495 Ultimately, Marlowe’s

492 Zucker, “Historical Overview of Diamond Cuts,” Nature of Diamond, 137 493 "pointed, adj.2". OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/146625?rskey=FCN3mP&result=2&i sAdvanced=false (accessed February 24, 2014). 494 Madhavi Menon, “Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy,” ELH 70 (2003): 653-75, esp. 656. 495 Madhavi, “Richard II,” 656-57 165 diamond does not fully obey the solubility of metaphor. The materiality of the diamond refuses dissolution in the symbolic. Perhaps there is something in Barabas’s invocation of

Cynthia that permits the slide of metaphor, explaining why scholars understandably interested in highlighting the injustices of the early modern marriage market attend to it.

The tropic path between diamonds and moon and women proves so well trodden that a translucent poetic smoothness replaces the textured life of stone, rock, and human, which proves difficult to recover.

But foiling and cutting, these activities are bound up in the matter of the diamond.

They set the diamond before us and set it off from the march of metaphor from signified to signifier. The material specificity and reality of diamond foils and diamond cuts strain against linguistic translation, as indicated by the difficulty that N.W. Bawcutt appears to have in constructing in his edition of The Jew of Malta explanatory notes on the lines addressing these practices. Indeed, although Bawcutt provides a brief definition for

“square or pointed,” with an attendant reference to Mandeville, he does not venture a guess for how “pointed” correlates with Abigail’s body. 496 I would suggest that this absence speaks not to a lack of knowledge or interpretative abilities but rather to the failure of metaphor to fully convert the diamond. Diamond and daughter linger in the scene, neither subsumed into the other, because what we are dealing with here is not, or not only, the sterile handling of metaphor, but, rather, the queer touch of metonymy.

Both Menon and Cary Howie in their respective work on metonymy acknowledge the trope’s relationship to metaphor. Indeed, a glance at the OED’s entry for “metonymy” discovers a definition eerily akin to that cited earlier for metaphor: “(A figure of speech

496 Marlowe, Jew of Malta , Bawcutt, 2.3.60n. 166 characterized by) the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it….” 497 However, as both Menon and Howie observe, unlike metaphor, the

“substitution” of metonymy remains incomplete. With metaphor, object B takes object

A’s place, the former making off with all that constitutes the latter. With metonymy, object B and object A brush up against one another in what Menon terms a “suggestive contiguity.” 498 Howie particularly underscores the tactility of the metonymic moment of

“contiguity.” He writes, “…I would argue that metonymy offers a relationship of contiguity…which does not swallow part into whole, but rather, preserves each of its terms in the surface upon which they touch. Metonymy is thus the trope of borders, tact, and the very spaciousness of these.” 499 Metonymy serves as the tropic landscape in which bodies that are not supposed to meet do, lingering in one another’s presence and challenging material boundaries. The refusal of metonymy to get in line, to follow metaphor in the clean hand-off of attributes, bespeaks a certain amount of transgression.

Another word for this refusal is desire, as both Menon and Howie underscore. Yet here their readings of desiring metonymy diverge in a way that informs our understanding of

Barabas’s metonymic diamond and daughter.

For Howie, the desire that metonymy unleashes ushers in a celebratory potentiality of new combinations, a new world architecture. For Menon, while the

497 "metonymy, n.". OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/117628?redirectedFrom=metonymy (accessed February 25, 2014). Menon might suggest that this parity signals the denotative difficulty that metonymy produces. 498 Menon, “Richard II,” 658 499 Cary Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 93. 167 recognition of metonymic desire proves profoundly important, of political urgency even, this desire holds out no such salvation. Of Richard II , Menon writes:

A metonymic reading, on the other hand, has the virtue of mirroring the

corruption of language—so horrific as to be publically unreadable—with a

corruption of sexuality, reinforcing both Freud and Lacan’s analyses of the link

between metonymy and desire. As the trope governing that which cannot be

clearly and independently articulated, metonymy lurks in the shadows of this

English garden threatening, like that other serpent, to cause the fall of man. 500

Metonymy gestures toward the wayward desire that always already snakes through “a compulsory metaphoric reading,” which is also “a compulsory heterosexual reading.” 501

It foregrounds touching bodies, queer couplings, that a heteronormative hermeneutics will seek to straighten out and overwrite but which is also its very condition.

I hesitate to suggest that feminist scholars who treat the interchange between

Barabas and Lodowick, diamond and Abigail, as metaphor do so to shore up a heteronormative reading of the scene or of Marlowe’s play. Instead, they seek to highlight the reality of many early modern women who were indeed moved like commodities through the contemporary marriage market—a marriage market underwritten by enforced heterosexuality. I sympathize with the impulse. The scene is mean and cruel. The “hopeless” (1.2.316) Abigail’s life is nasty, brutish, and short in a way that undermines the histrionic jocularity with which many scholars and stagings have

500 Menon, “Richard II,” 670. 501 Menon, “Richard II,” 669. Here I am invoking the Derridean concept of the always already . 168 met The Jew of Malta .502 However, Marlowe ultimately challenges this singular metaphorical translation because it denies the material conditions of the matter of the diamond. In Barabas and Lodowick’s exchange (however half-heartedly participated in by Barabas), the diamond refuses to convert, to be emptied out into metaphor. The stone persists. And the bodies of Abigail and the diamond circle one another in a “palmers’ kiss.” 503

But neither does Marlowe offer an epithalamion of girl and gem. This instant of touch does not hold out new horizons. Marlowe’s insistence of imprinting diamond on girl and girl on diamond, his preservation of a metynomic proximity that Shakespeare eschews, yields a different and less optimistic orientation. In The Merchant of Venice , religion and professional occupation would seem to map onto one another, providing the divisions by which scholars so often still talk about the play: alien/Jewish/usurer and

Venetian/Christian/merchant. The diamond commodity, though, with its history pulsing through it, nods to a network of Jewish diamond communities and invites them into the play in a way that troubles singular and/or binaristic modes of identity. The diamond gives us a play of unconsidered possibilities. But The Jew of Malta does not trade in the same religious and occupational oppositions. Marlowe establishes Barabas’s work as a merchant in the play’s initial lines as he tallies the earnings from recent ship laddings and sales: “So that of thus much that return was made: / And of the third part of the Persian ships, / There was the venture summed and satisfied” (1.1.1-3). And that Lodowick lands

502 For example, Greenblatt notes the audience’s laughter in response to the staging of the poisoning of the nuns in the 1964 Royal Shakespeare Company staging; See Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx,” 296 503 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet , The Norton Shakespeare , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008), 897-972, esp. 1.5.97. 169 on the diamond as a viable cover for a public discussion about Abigail indicates an accepted association between Jewish merchants as the sourcers for diamonds. The technical gemnological knowledge that Barabas evinces both affirms his involvement in the diamond trade and speaks to a broader network of Jewish connections in the diamond cutting and setting industry. Yet, even as the relationship between Jewish networks and diamonds would seem to frame the interaction between Barabas and Lodowick,

Marlowe’s tropic turn into a metonymy that highlights the bodies of the diamond and

Abigail reroutes our reading.

What intrigues about Barabas and Lodowick’s diamond dealings is the treatment of the stone not as a commodity. Barabas tells Lodowick, “As for the diamond, sir, I told you of, / Come home, and there’s no price shall make us part” (2.3.93). In Marlowe, the diamond is supposedly a thing of gift—even if Barabas harbors no intention of giving that gift. And here we come to an instance of strange contiguity between the diamond that

Marlowe potentially sets before us and our own prominent mode of engagement with the stone: the diamond engagement ring, the gift that traditionally codifies heterosexual union. We typically speak of this gift in symbolic terms, as a signifier of private commitment, of eternal devotion (to use the temporal dimension of De Beers). But, as

Jeffrey Cohen describes, the materiality of the stone is turned “heteronormativity in crystal form.” 504 The matter of the diamond becomes the public porte-parole of matrimony. Cohen writes, “A mooring device in the guise of a bodily adornment, an infinitely repeating cliché, the diamond engagement ring is the sanctifier of the connubial

504 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 10 170 couple, the guarantor of the superlativeness and immunity from time that love within licit marriage is supposed to possess.” 505

Drawing upon the work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karen

Newman emphasizes the power dynamics at play in the giving of gifts: “Gift-giving, then for Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, establishes social bonds and is a strategy of power.” 506

Following Lévi-Strauss, Newman particularly attends to the “gender-specific” nature of gift-giving in the male “exchange of women.”507 With the diamond engagement ring, as signaled by Cohen’s use of “mooring device,” we locate a very specific “strategy of power” that has implications not only for the “exchange of women” but also for the scaffolding of our political and cultural institutions. Set into the matrimonial context, the gift of the diamond is meant to get bodies, both human and stone, into line. The diamond orients toward “licit” (to employ Cohen’s word) heterosexual couplings whose telos is the production of offspring—the formation of a family unit whose genealogical lines of descent stretch into a forever future and point back only to a past of sanitized desire. The bodies that don’t follow the diamond lines, or that do not enhance it, are written out, forgotten. 508

The metonym of Abigail and the diamond testify to the bodies, human and non, that are made to bear the burden of supposedly sanctioned desires. Their bodies are to be marked with the kind of straight lines along which Lodowick moves—Lodowick who identifies himself to Barabas by recourse to patrilineage: “Barabas, thou know’st I am the governor’s son” (2.3.40). Lodowick first introduces the diamond as cipher for Abigail,

505 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,”10. 506 Newman, Portia, 20 507 Newman, 20 508 Cohen gestures to this point as well; see Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 10. 171 stone converted straight into woman. And this metaphoric, linguistic conversion would foretell a religious translation from Jewish to Christian with Abigail as Lodowick’s wife.

This translation of diamond and daughter would erase the past, cover up the tracks of

Lodowick’s wayward desire for Barabas’s daughter—a desire that, at least initially, does not appear to be oriented toward matrimony. As Cohen writes of the modern diamond engagement ring, “To become so precious the jewel’s material origins must be erased: no dwelling on the labor conditions under which the gem was excavated, no contemplation of the civil wars or terrorism its purchase may have financed.” 509 Yet in the metonymic refusal of the diamond to dematerialize, in the uncomfortable proximity between stone and woman, the jaggedness of such straight lines shows.

Moreover, the propinquity of Abigail and the diamond brings before the reader and spectator other bodies for which the metaphorical sign of the diamond has no use. I hold it as no coincidence that Lodowick and Barabas’s talk of diamonds develops in the midst of Malta’s slave mart. Directly before the entrance of Barabas, and Lodowick shortly thereafter, officers pronounce a market in human flesh open for business. One officer remarks, “This is the market-place, here let’em stand: / Fear not their sale, for they’ll be quickly bought” (2.3.1-2). To which a second officer replies, “Every one’s price is written on his back, / And so much must they yield or not be sold” (2.3.3-4).

Amidst this space, amongst these bodies, walk Barabas and Lodowick as they muse about the qualities of a diamond of a daughter. That each of the men for sale must “yield” recalls the men, women, and children who worked the Indian mines discussed in Chapter

Two and who “yielded” stones in conditions and for wages that approximated slave labor.

509 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 10 172 The conclusion of Barabas and Lodowick’s diamond business transitions into the purchase of slaves in a language that revises Barabas’s earlier extolling of labor barren eastern gems in his first appearance on the stage. In the opening counting house scene,

Barabas telescopes from the coins piled around him to the mountains of the East.

Denigrating the “paltry silverlings” (1.1.6) paid him for imports of Greek wine and

Spanish oil, Barabas celebrates the type of reserves amassed by “The wealthy Moor”

(1.1.21). This lauded, eastern, fat cat counts his wealth not in coin but in gemstones:

“Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, / Jacinths, hard topaz, grasse-green emeralds, /

Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds” (1.1.25-27). Barabas suggests that these kinds of jewels are the “Infinite riches in a little room” (1.137) that comprise his own net worth.

The merchant observes, “This is the ware wherein consists my wealth” (1.1.33). That the diamond concludes the catalogue that Barabas conjures speaks to the particular desirability of the stone for early modern traders and their clientele. Diamonds and the other gems listed, not money, are that for which Barabas counsels fellow merchants to aim: “And thus, methinks, should men of judgement frame / Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade” (1.1.34-35). Of particular interest is the way in which Barabas describes the gems acquisition:

The wealthy Moor, that in the easterne rocks

Without control can pick his riches up,

And in house heap pearl like pebble-stones:

Receive them free, and sell them by the weight. (1.1.121-24)

In Barabas’s depiction, not only does the Moor procure his gemstones “free” from a proprietary system of oversight but also “free” from any labor. Seemingly strewn across

173 the surface of “the easterne rockes,” the glimmering riches merely await the passerby. In the early moments of the play, Marlowe thus delivers the myth of the laborless diamond canvassed in the previous chapter.

Thus, in the market, when Barabas eyes a slave priced at “Two hundred crowns” and exclaims “Do the Turke weigh so much?” (2.3.99-100), the correspondence that he makes between weight and worth returns the reader to the line in his initial bejeweled speech that similarly ties measurement and value. “Receive them free, and sell them by the weight,” Barabas says of the “eastern” “riches” “Without controle.” Yet whereas this prior moment foregrounds the absence of labor—diamonds and other gems

“Receive[d]…free”—its echoing in the slave market scene cannot but insist upon labor, upon bodies doing the kind of work that brings diamonds to the marketplace. Moreover, the name of the individual upon whom Barabas eventually settles, Ithamore, likewise returns the audience to “The wealthy Moor” evoked in Barabas’s counting house.

Madhavi Menon has suggested that in “Ithamore,” we here “I-the-Moor.” 510 Admittedly,

Ithamore pronounces “Trace” his birthplace and “Arabia” the locale of his childhood

(2.3.131). This assertion has led Mark Hutchings to speculate that “Ithamore is, it seems, a victim of the Ottoman policy of recruiting by force Christian boys from the Balkans and converting them to Islam to serve in either the Turkish military or the Ottoman government.” 511 Hutchings provides a compelling argument, yet he too notes “the fluidity

510 Menon offered this reading in a graduate seminar on the genre of drama at American University. 511 Mark Hutchings, “‘In Thrace; Brought up in Arabia’: The Jew of Malta , II.iii.131,” Notes and Queries (December 2000): 428-30, esp., 429; I was led to Hutchings work by way of reference in the scholarship of. Bruce Brandt; See Bruce Brandt, “Slave, Alien, and Son: Marlowe’s Ithamore,” Selected Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature , ed. John Kerr (2011): 21-29. 174 and complexity of ideological designations” in The Jew of Malta .512 And the naming of

Ithamore retains an inherent ambiguity.” As Hutchings himself outlines, the 1633 quarto conflates the lines of Ithamore with the first slave to whom Barabas turns his attention, a man identified as a “Moore” (E1r). 513

Moor in the early modern period could reference a North African practitioner of

Islam, as indicated in the first definition for the word in the OED. 514 And Martin del

Bosco does characterize some of the enslaved peoples that he hopes to sell in Malta as

“Afric Moors” (2.2.9). However, much like Ithamore himself, the term Moor was fractured with multiple associations of place and culture. Emily Bartels writes, “As critics have established, the term ‘Moor’ was used interchangeable with such similarly ambiguous terms as ‘African,’ ‘Ethiopian,’ ‘Negro,’ and even ‘Indian’ to designate a figure from different parts or the whole of Africa (or beyond) who was either black or

Moslem, neither, or both.” 515 In the second definition under Moor , the OED makes explicit the connection in the period between Moor and India , to which Bartels gestures:

“A Muslim; spec. a Muslim inhabitant of India or Sri Lanka.” One of the usage examples offered, dating within a few years of The Jew of Malta’s composition, derives from the

English translation of the Venetian Cesare Ferderici’s travels into India: “And wheras I

512 Hutchings, 429. 513 Hutchings, 429. 514 “Originally: a native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting north-western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th cent. conquered Spain,”; See "Moor, n.2". OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/121965?rskey=D7lAQz&result=2&is Advanced=false (accessed February 28, 2014). 515 Emily Bartels, “Making Moor of the More: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 433-54, esp.434. 175 speak of Moores I meane Mahomets sect.” As I discuss in Chapter Two, the merchant,

Federici exhaustively details the Indian trade in gemstones, specifically in Indian diamonds.

I do not mean to suggest that Ithamore was Indian, not the converted Christian that Hutchings posits him or the Turk that the play seems to signal him elsewhere.

Clearly, the play itself wanders away from such efforts at exact coordinates. But I do think that in “I-tha-more” Marlowe’s audience might have traced the memory of “The wealthy Moor, that in the Easterne rockes” culls diamonds and other gems as though they were “pebble-stones.” And that in the homonym of “more/Moor” they might too have heard the word India , the only place in the world with which they would have associated the diamonds that inaugurate the play’s first act and that interpolate Malta’s slave market.

Yet Ithamore repeats “The wealthy Moor” with a difference. 516 His laboring body provides the human underpinning for the myth of unmoiled, Indian diamonds.

In the daylight of the play’s slave market, the jeweled dream of Barabas’s counting house disappears. The “diamond” over which Barabas and Lodowick haggle denies the detmaterializing translation of metaphor and instead prevails upon the audience to mark the bodies that did perforce deal in its matter. As evinced in Barabas’s invocation of Cynthia, the diamond could sometimes be corralled into poetic metaphor serving the means and/or ends of “a compulsory heterosexual reading” (to quote Menon again). But what the metonymic diamond in The Jew of Malta lays bare are all of the bodies, the bodies of Jewish woman and Indians and stone, upon which the metaphorical

516 Here I am thinking, thanks to Madhavi Menon, of Derrida’s concept of différance; See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 63-171.

176 diamond—of beauty, of purity, of marriage—is set. The recovery of the material diamond does not leave us feeling any better about Marlowe’s Jew of Malta . Indeed, it highlights the generic “tragedy” showcased in the title by which early moderns would have known the play: “The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta”—a tragedy that we somehow feel empowered to forget amidst our reveling in histrionics, much like our amnesia in the presence of the diamond engagement ring. 517

***

In the end, the diamonds of both Marlowe and Shakespeare materialize on the stage, bringing with them histories and presents and futures of relationships with the human. However, these diamonds orient us toward the networks in which they satellite in distinct ways and to divergent effect. In Marlowe, Shakespeare would have found implicit reference to the diamond knowledge and work practiced by continental, Jewish merchants and lapidaries. That Jessica chooses to take the diamond indexes her understanding of its value, placing her (at least tangentially) within this network of

Jewish specialization. 518 To be sure, Shakespeare follows the generic conventions of comedy and ends The Merchant of Venice in heteronormative, Christian marriage with the “villainous” Shylock resolved by conversion and material dispossession. And I would put pressure upon Bullough’s assessment of Jessica’s life post-Shylock: “Shakespeare’s

Jessica neither saves her father’s gold nor aids in his revenge; she steals his property and elopes to happiness at Belmont.” 519 But in the moment of its appearance, Shylock’s

517 Christopher Marlo[we], The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Ieww of Malta (London, 1633) British Library STC 17412. 518 I greatly appreciate Holly Dugan’s willingness to share this insight with me. 519 Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 1:455. 177 diamond does open up an eddy of possibility that swirls against the course of the play and subsequent readings of it. In introducing the diamond commodity with its Frankfurt provenance, Shakespeare suggests that the material diamond invites an inclusion that troubles the exclusion of identity politics established along racial and religious lines. This is the radical promise of The Merchant of Venice : the chance that the diamond commodity could enchant—could hold out a play and a world different than the one that we thought we inhabited. This is not the promise of The Jew of Malta . The diamond in

Marlowe excavates the ways in which foreign bodies—Jewish merchants and lapidaries,

Jewish daughters, Indian miners, the stone itself—are made to underwrite the very systems of hegemony that make their bodies illegible. The inability of heteronormative power (broadly construed) to get rid of these bodies does not so much hold out hope for a new system as reveal the extant order constructed out of perverse desires deemed straight and normative—a “dark current” of radical disenchantment. 520

Where does this leave us in our summation of these diamond instances and the plays in which they appear? Is Shakespeare’s diamond a revision marked by foolish hope, a revision that might indeed replicate the very hegemonic erasure that Marlowe foregrounds? Does Marlowe’s diamond direct toward a pessimistic descent that forecloses on the possibility of anything other than a sordid interaction between human and stone? Does the mutuality of their existence necessitate that we read with one diamond or the other? Ultimately, the diamond of Shakespeare is the diamond of

Marlowe, and the diamond of Marlowe is the diamond of Shakespeare. The material diamonds in both The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta describe what it means

520 Greenblatt employs the phrase “dark current” in discussing the “sameness” of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice ; See Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx,” 295. 178 to live with the stones, to be always in the realm of both enchantment and disenchantment.

179 Coda: Diamonds of the Old Water

The diamond is the most precious of all stones, and it is the article of trade to which I am most devoted.

~ Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India 521

In December of 1683, the Thames seemed to still. The river coursing through the city of London froze. The waters between the banks metamorphosed into a thoroughfare of ice, a glacial expanse of fete and consumption. In his diary entry for January 24, 1684,

John Evelyn writes, “The frost continues more and more severe, the Thames before

London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished, and full of commodities, even to a printing press….”522 From this wintry printing press came a poem entitled “Thamasis’s Advice to the Painter From Her Frigid

Zone: Or Wonders upon the Water” (1684). 523 The anonymous poet gives voice to the

Thames. Fashionably attired in a rimy couture, the river directs an artist as to how to capture on “Canvas” “The strange suprising Sights , the numerous Train , That all about my Back do walk or sit .”524 In her instructions, she particularly attends to the riparian booths that Evelyn mentions. She retails the pop-up shops scintillating consumers along

521 Tavernier, 2:55. 522 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn , ed. William Bray, 2 vols. (Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), 2:193, available from Project Gutenburg, accessed May 14, 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42081/42081-h/42081-h.htm. Many thanks to Lowell Duckert without whom this coda would not appear as it does. Lowell provided me with the reference to ice diamonds contained in the work of Joseph Ward, which led me to the poem “Thamasis’s Advice”; See Joseph Ward, “Taming the Thames: Reading the River in the Seventeenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71 (2008): -75. 523 The poem’s publication information is given as “Printed by G. Croom , on the River Thames .” “Thamasis’s Advice to the Painter From Her Frigid Zone: Or Wonders upon the Water” (London, 1684) British Library Wing T9833; See also Ward, 67. 524 “Thamsis’s,” n.p; emphasis poet’s. 180 “Temple Blanket-street ” where the “Water men” now “cry” “What is’t you lack, what is’t you buy ?” 525 The river lists all manner of foodstuffs available—a feast of “ Coffee ” and alcohol and meats, with only “green Pease and Cherries ” hard to come by—before specifically mentioning a purchase of a different kind. She says:

Here you may buy a Diamond Ring for nought

Such as from India ne’er was brought;

(The Cuts were Diamond , the Substance , Ice ,

Which in Mens Pockets vanish’d in a trice:

But for his Cheat , the Man will pay full dear,

Condemned by my Lord to Whipping Chear .) 526

In the winter of 1683-1684, you could walk across the water in London and buy a diamond.

A diamond of sorts. The rings procured in the midst of the “carnival on the water” bore diamonds carved of ice. 527 Against the warmth of the human body, the stones liquefied, leaving an imprint of water behind. How are we to read this moment of melting diamonds? We might be tempted to dispense with the diamonds as fakes, snickering at the gullibility of the buyers. What did they think that they would get for “nought”? This instance of “diamond” dealing thus becomes a well-executed prank, worthy of frostbitten

“carnival” and deserving of a guffaw. Yet, despite the seeming jocularity of the poet’s

525 I her follow the poet in the gendering of the Thames; See “Thamsis’s,” n.p.; emphasis poet’s. As the title for Joseph Moxon’s map of the 1683-84 Thames freezing indicates, what Evelyn termed the “bacchanalian triumph” was popularly called Blanket Fair; See J[oseph] Moxon, “A Map of the River Thames Merrily Cald Blanket Fair” (London, 1683/4), Bodleian Library, Wing M3004; Evelyn, 193. 526 “Thamais’s,” n.p.; emphasis poet’s. 527 Evelyn, 193. 181 tone, city officials took the hoax seriously enough to earn the perpetrator “ Whipping

Chear .” The OED notes “chear” as a variant for “cheer” from the fifteenth until the seventeenth centuries. The entry notes “whipping-cheer” as an “ironical” deployment of

“cheer”: “Kindly welcome or reception, hospitable entertainment…to give a kindly welcome, to receive and entertain…and ironical whipping-cheer ….” 528 The definition for

“whipping-cheer” housed under the entry for “whipping” discloses the euphemism: “n. humorous Obs. flogging, flagellation” (OED). 529 The reality of “whipping-cheer” belies the blitheness of the term. The practice was violent, and, depending upon the cause, could provoke civic unrest. In a letter dated 1621, the Reverend Joseph Mead details for Sir

Martin Stuteville the “whipping chear” handed down in London to “Three ’prentices” for insulting and assaulting the train of the (in)famous Spanish ambassador Gondomar:

“…their sentence was to be whipped from Aldgate through London…They were tied to a cart’s tail and whipped….” 530 Disorder ensued as “300 of all sorts made the rescue” of the beleaguered apprentices turned folk heroes, with another 1000 men waiting in the wings. 531 James I “threatened” the city with a consequence akin martial law through the presence of “a garrison…if there were no better rule kept….” 532 Thus, to order

“whipping-cheer” for peddling ice diamonds was no small thing.

528 "cheer, n.1". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/31142?rskey=9kADpf&result=1&isA dvanced=false (accessed May 14, 2014). 529 "whipping, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/228434?rskey=p0Sc3e&result=1&isA dvanced=false (accessed May 14, 2014). 530 Joseph Mead, “Rev. Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville,” The Court and Times of James the First , ed. Thomas Birch 2 vols .(London: Henry Colburn, 1849), 2:246-49, esp.247. 531 Mead, 247. 532 Mead, 248. 182 What the customers at the Blanket Fair beheld were diamonds, or objects touched in some way by the matter of the diamond. “The Cuts were Diamond ,” the poet parenthesizes. This presents two possibilities. Either the cutting of the ice was achieved by a diamond, or the cuts of the ice were those that would typically mark a diamond. Or possibly both. If the hardness of a diamond had been harnessed to incise the ice, then the diamond quite literally would have left its tracks in the frozen water. If the “ Cuts ” followed those of the diamond, then in the facets of the ice would glimmer the reflection of the eastern gem. Indeed, one wonders what these “ Cuts ” would look like. Would the ice stones partake of the point and table cuts so achievable and thus ascendant throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries? Would they have followed the rose cut that came into popular use in the beginning decade of the 1600s? 533 Or would the ice diamonds have offered the novelty of the brilliant cut, developed but a few decades before in France during the 1660s?534

The Blanket Fair unfolded roughly a year before the death of Charles II—a monarch restored after the Protectorate of Cromwell, the regicide of Charles I, and a civil war. This was not the moment of the first Stuart king, James I, or the last of the Tudors,

533 Scarisbrick and Benjamin Zucker (“Diamond Cuts”) would appear to diverge on the moment of the rose cut’s development and dominance. Zucker posits 1500; however, the care of Scarisbrick’s archival work as a historian leads one to be more persuaded by her argument. Scarisbrick underscores the difficulty of establishing a clear line of cutting developments due to the paucity of documentation on cutting as opposed to setting diamonds: “Although the exact circumstances in which faceting progressed from the first polished point cut through the table cut, the lozenge cut, the rose cut, and the brilliant cut were poorly recorded, no such mystery surrounds the settings created for them”; See Diana Scarisbrick, “Regal Ornaments: Six Centuries of Diamond Jewelry,” The Nature of Diamonds , 142-70, esp 143, 149 and Zucker. 534 Scarisbrick, “Regal Ornaments,” The Nature of Diamonds , 149. 183 Elizabeth I. That fashion had altered is indicated by the “Thamasis’s” poet’s depiction of the river’s “ borrow’d tresses ”: atop her head sat “a Periwig of Snow ” (emphasis poet’s).

Portraiture leading up to and into the years of the English Civil War demonstrate that the fashion fade for wigs had yet to begin. 535 Clearly, diamond cuts had changed too, as indicated above. Yet what intrigues about the poet’s description of the ice diamonds hawked in the winter of 1683-1684 is the way in which it forms a point of contact with how people thought about, thought with, diamonds in the previous decades. India, however conceived in the early years of the 1680s, still provided the coordinates of diamond orientation. This is perhaps to be expected because, as noted in Chapter Two and throughout, the Brazilian diamond cache that ultimately challenged Indian supplies would not be discovered for roughly another fifty years. But still, incursions into the New

World had led to murmurings of possible diamond sources. 536 Nevertheless, for the

English in the closing years of the seventeenth century, diamonds still delivered “travail” narratives of India.

Perhaps more surprising though is that, to an extent, water lingered as the element of the diamond. The advance of the brilliant cut meant that, at least in popular usage, fire

(and with it light) would ultimately become the diamond’s medium.537 Interestingly, while the OED acknowledges the connection between diamonds and water under the definition for the latter, it does not appear to offer the same correspondence between

535 See Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 536 For example, Ralegh notes the possibility of diamonds in his travels to Guiana. 537 In Chapter Two, I initially discuss the integrity of “water” to early modern conceptions of diamonds. Also on “light” of diamond, see Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty , 311. 184 diamonds and fire, regardless of period.538 More archival research is required to assess the earliest correlations between fire and diamonds, particularly in England. However, we can perhaps trace out its beginnings in the affinity granted between the brilliant cut diamond and the sun, a ball of fire. Diana Scarisbrick records “the Parisian jeweler

Robert de Berquen[‘s]” delight in the emergence of the brilliant cut: “When the brilliant cut appeared in the 1660s the Parisian jeweler Robert de Berquen applauded the diamond as the ‘sun shining among precious stones.’” 539 And the French King anointed with the sun’s rays, Louis XIV, the Sun King, adopted the diamond as his personal style standard. 540 However, for the men and women browsing through and buying from the ice diamond booth, the intimacy between the diamond and water seems to have remained and informed their experience. If the trick of the ice diamonds was to replace carbon molecules with hydrogen and oxygen, then its ingenuity rested in pushing not only jewels

538 "fire, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/70512?rskey=M0RRGD&result=1&is Advanced=false (accessed May 12, 2014). This is true for both def of fire and for diamond. 539 Scarisbrick, Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty , 311. 540 On the integrity of the diamond to the reign of Louis XIV, see Joan de Jean, How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (New York: Free Press, 2005), 161-76; For de Jean, whose work I respect tremendously, Louis XIV ignited the desire for the diamond: “In France and during his [Louis XIV’s] reign, however, and largely as a result of his personal intervention, the diamond was catapulted from relative obscurity to the position it still holds today” (163). I do not deny Louis XIV’s ardor for the stone or his role in increasing its fashionable presence. But perhaps due to an unintended bias of period and country, de Jean as a eighteenth century, French historian overstates the case. As is hopefully clear by now, Reorienting the Diamond in Early Modern England comes to a very different conclusion. I do not submit that Europeans would have thought of the diamond as “English” or the English as trendsetters for the stone. Nor do I argue that the English did not link the diamond to France, as well as to Indian. But what I suggest here is that the diamond did have a material presence both in the country of England and in English imagination prior to the reign of France’s Sun King.

185 possibly touched by diamonds and shaped like diamonds but also consisting of a matter that the diamond seemed to share.

As I have indicated throughout, particularly in Chapter Two’s discussion of

Mandeville and Marco Polo and Ralph Fitch’s Indian travels, for the early modern

English, water conveyed the beauty of the diamond. Through a diamond’s water, and the order (first, second, third, etc.) and/or age (i.e. diamonds of the old water) of that water, moved its lustre. Scarisbrick documents the way in which the foiling of diamonds, the setting technique so integral to the period, depended upon the “particular lustre or water” of the individual stone. 541 For early moderns, lustre connoted a shine linked to clarity, a property somewhat distinct from the explosion of light, the rainbow fracturing, that we grant to brilliance. 542 Indeed, just as we have now lost the bearings of certain colors referenced in early modern texts, I wonder if we have fully recovered the resonance of water for the early modern diamond. 543 Perhaps part of that recovery is to recognize that for the early modern English water was not just an aesthetic attribute of a diamond but the very constitutional nature of the stone.

541 Scarisbrick, Diana. Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection , 44 . 542 lustre, n.1". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/111401?rskey=zYRRPY&result=1&i sAdvanced=false (accessed May 12, 2014); The first entry for “brilliance” in the OED does not occur until 1755, and the initial entry for “brilliant” appears in 1690 with specific reference to the diamond; See "brilliance, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/23334?redirectedFrom=brilliance (accessed May 12, 2014) and " ˈbrilliant, n.1". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/23336?rskey=XoE6id&result=1&isA dvanced=false (accessed May 14, 2014). 543 I credit my awareness to the difficulties of researching early modern colors to a Folger seminar led by Joan de Jean; Joan de Jean, The Novel and La Mode: Marketing Novelties (1670-1720) ), Folger Shakespeare Library, Fall 2006. 186 I earlier cite Jeffery Cohen’s lovely description of the dual aspect of the diamond:

“They [diamonds] seem impossibly to be of two elements at once, earth (they are minerals) and water (yet they seem immutable ice).”544 The nuance of Cohen’s conditional “seem” in the second parenthesis proves integral. Diamonds might be the earth’s hardest substance, capable of marking a window with a princess’s protestations and longings. Yet something in the stone resists ossification—a material resistance to which we are now so little attune but to which early modern texts gesture. Diamonds, whether of carbon or ice, melt. When we come upon these stony puddles, we discover travels and travails, other places and bodies, material mutability that reorients how we approach, to invoke Ahmed once again, the diamond. Diamonds traffic in fluidity. The stones leave a watery imprint upon the human, seeping across boundaries of identity and desire. Rich and strange , radiant and strange , diamonds can make the human rich and radiant and strange too. 545 But they can also crystallize, however momentarily, the murkiness of our deluded desires and the cost of making the water of those desires run clear.

544 Cohen, “Sex Life of Stone,” 13. 545 The italicized portions derive from quotations from Nicholas Hilliard’s Treatise and Shakespeare’s Tempest , which I reference in the introduction. 187 Bibliography

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